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Review: I Nominate

★★★☆☆

Three stars

In Sophie Sparkes’s play, the unfortunate John is the first nominated victim. He iscoerced by the unrelenting gaze of his flatmate’s iPhone into a neck nomination. By the end of the play, it’s not just John who has fallen captive to this gaze. All the characters seem to be prey to the spectral yet somehow real presence of the online world. It chases them through sticky nightclubs and grimy flats. It changes how they see themselves, how they see each other and how they see the world. They have been nominated to participate in a world where reality and its representation have become one.

The search for authenticity glimmers in every drop of dirty pint, every note of the Pokémon theme tune and the notification banner when a new like has legitimised the new profile picture. Only in meaningless extremes and ridiculous self-indulgences do these characters believe they can come to some truth. Living in this hyper-reality of multiple, conflicting narratives is at the heart of I Nominate and its depiction of the millennial life experience.

We see our characters thrashing away to cheap techno as one of them repeats verbatim Buzzfeed articles and Facebook comments. Indeed, Jodie and John can’t seem to get off without Jodie thinking about the ‘15 celebrity couples who should break up’. Meanwhile John’s taunting flatmate, Caroline, seems to be present in John’s recounting of the story, constantly distorting and questioning the narrative. The whole thing is some sort of postmodern nightmare in which the structures of ‘68 not only continue to walk the streets but now grind it out to the sounds of ‘Call Me Maybe”.

All this is great but it’s been done before. Much of the play feels like a mid-to-late-90s film. It’s all very fragmented and yet terribly knowing. There’s throbbing dance music abound and monologues set to slow motion raving. Think Run Lola Run, The Matrix and all that. Indeed one scene (which I won’t give away) is so startlingly similar to a scene in Pulp Fiction that I wonder whether the replication was intentional or not.

In many ways it makes perfect sense if (as the play perhaps suggests) we are still trapped in the same postmodern malaise of the 90s. What is unsatisfactory is that these stylistic choices do

not really seem to lead anywhere. In the 45 min- ute run time, we are effectively told two stories. In the first story we see John and Caroline neck nominating each other and then John recounting multiple versions of how he met Jodie in a club. In the second story Jodie and John’s friend Chris stumble into the flat and a small crisis ensues.

Neither of the stories really come together with any form of resolution. The intriguing premise of showing our online obsessed generation should have been developed in order to say somethingabout it. Is there a ‘real’ world anymore? Does the extremity of a neck nomination have something authentic about it? All issues flirted with but ultimately not properly explored or commented on.

In spite of this, one cannot fault the cast. Their drive was incredibly professional, never flagging in energy or focus throughout. John is in some ways the heart of the play in his pathetic submis- siveness to everyone around him.

There is something incredibly natural and convincing about Will Spence’s forlorn resignation as he gazes out at us while Chris (Christian Amos) goes of the hinges. Chris is the impulsive egomaniac of the piece, one of those people who seems to believe he is as faultless as his profile picture. Christian Amos brings a real edge to these antics. Rebecca Watson plays Jodie, a character that is very difficult to pull off, being at once an archetype of a generation but also an individual character in her own right. Watson does it, however, with great panache, mixing an aloofness in the club with desperate naivety later on. Finally, the lynchpin of the proceedings, Caroline, is played with abundant confidence and control by Katie Piner, a real tour de force in naturalism from her.

In short this was an extremely strong ensemble with real commitment to their project. One just wishes, however, that it had been a project with a clearer sense of direction and coherency

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