'The Nether' at The Duke of York's Theatre

'The Nether' - the adopted, scarily advanced grandchild of the internet. It can create sensations of touch, of smell, of sight and can even allow humans to 'cross over' into a universe we ourselves play God to. 

thenethertheplay.co.uk

I'm always a little bit dubious to believe reviews that use the words 'riveting' and 'spectacular', but true to its critics, 'The Nether' gave us everything we expected and more - more being the hour long debate me and my partner had following the show. 

theselfishyears.blogspot.com

The atmosphere within the Duke of York’s Theatre procured an essence of Charlie Brooker-esque imagination accommodated by 5 strong performances from our cast. Our actors were supported by some interesting aesthetic projections of a live video feed from a camera on the interrogation desk CS and some effective and well-executed technical transitions between the downstage 'real-world' & upstage 'The Nether'. 

'The Nether' is a play set in 2050, that explores the interrogation of the man behind the creation of a coded reality, 'The Hideaway' - a server hidden in the depths of the future of the internet (the nether), that gives paedophiles of the 'real-world' a place to act upon their urges in a false world, a secondary world. In this world, anyone can enter, so long as they adhere to the rules of 'the nether'. This means, that in 'The Hideaway', those who appear as children, are in fact adults posing as children. So is it immoral - or isn't it? Who are we to deny our escapists the chance to enter another world? Who are we to define what is imagination and what is reality?

I have invited a guest blogger, Kamal Shaddad to pick apart the concept of 'The Nether' and its morality here: http://watchinabitotheatrenstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-nerdy-nether.html whilst my blogpost focuses solely on the production. In doing so, I have to commend the ladies for their performances. Amanda Hale is wonderfully abrupt as our interrogator yet brilliant as our emotionally-broken daughter also. Although, even Hale is marginally overshadowed by the London debut of the young Zoe Brough as Iris.

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The two older members of the cast had their moments although I felt that Stanley Townsend was perhaps a little stale when compared with his co-stars. David Calder’s performance was as I expected; he gave us diffidence as well as once again attributing a remarkable naivety to his character.

I also enjoyed the performance of Ivanno Jeremiah as Professor Woodnut. He was full of energy, full of likeable physicality traits that lure us too, into the trap of ‘The Hideaway’. The relationship that blossoms between Woodnut and Iris is believable because our cast make it so. It almost feels, dare I say it, REAL.

Jennifer Haley’s script is wonderfully eloquent in both exploring the future, and in identifying and challenging our moral altruism, particularly towards children. She lures us in to the interrogation, into assuming that Morris (Hale) is in the right, and Sims (Stanley) is in the wrong. Yet as the plot unfolds, the blur between right and wrong appears more obvious. Our interrogator herself, may not be so innocent of the 'crimes' committed within 'the hideaway'. Or are they crimes? Is Iris still a child, even though she is merely coded to look as such? Will we one day have to adapt our laws to define in which reality, in which world they exist to rule? Haley boldly throws up every counter-argument in the book before it has even a chance to settle. 'The Nether' is abundantly masterful. The set-design is simple yet bold and beautiful at the same time and the sound, video and lighting provide the transitions we needed to define both worlds represented onstage.

Its 80minute running time leaves its audience wanting, which is just how a play should leave it. When the lights came on, I was still captivated and it took me a while to leave my seat. It’s been a while since I was challenged in a similar way to ‘the nether’ and it’s a welcome break to find a playwright that writes with angst, with honesty and with foresight. I can’t wait to see Haley’s next works, don’t make it too long a wait!

Remember to head over here to discover more behind the concept and moral questions 'The Nether' provokes: http://watchinabitotheatrenstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-nerdy-nether.html

The Nerdy Nether

Hello one and all, I’m finally making an entrance into my partner’s blog! Hurraay! I'll be making an appearance now and again to ask the questions that don't get asked, and to help debate the concepts within the content we experience. 

Recently we went and saw the play ‘The Nether', which I highly recommend for reasons my girlfriend will explain: http://watchinabitotheatrenstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-nether-at-duke-of-yorks-theatre.html

So, here's what I have to say: (SPOILER ALERT)

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The story was incredibly engaging and really shined a light onto what many perceive as the ‘future of the internet’. So let us begin by explaining what the Nether roughly translates too. It is a sort of augmented reality similar to the world of the matrix but still has an internet feel to it. People ‘login’ which seems to completely render their bodies unconscious whilst their minds are engaged. We didn’t get to explore ‘the nether’ in its entirety as it focused entirely on one particular server, ‘The Hideaway’. Regardless of the plot this is quite interesting, where rather than servers hosting the simple web pages like we know, they now host worlds, created and coded by us. The play touched on the reality of senses and how things have advanced so much that we can seemingly trick our senses into believing that ‘the nether’ worlds are real.

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Most people would instantly jump at the Matrix having coined this particular style of ‘the internet’ but I would have to disagree strongly. Anime films such as Ghost in the Shell (fantastic by the way) made 5 years earlier already touched on this. Many 80’s Sci-fi already included this notion of a virtual world in which we could visit as we pleased. It all sounds like something from our distant future, but actually it isn’t. Look up virtual reality gear such as the Oculus Rift or Project Morpheus by Sony and you can see that we are already heading in that direction. The main contender with it is Microsoft’s newly announced HoloLens which is an actual functioning Augmented Reality headset. This means that put the large headgear on and prepare to see holograms fit perfectly in the surroundings. The idea of an internet we can physically partake in is still far away but at least we can see the horizon. An internet like ‘the Nether’ doesn’t seem so distant now does it?

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But is something like this good? The point of the play was to highlight the potential way ‘the Nether’ could be abused but at the same time questioned our morality. I used to be part of online literature forum which included role-playing and for this reason, the production really resounded with me. What is reality? It’s what you see in front of you, it’s what engages your mind body and senses. Yet what if we were able to create a universe that was far more amazing than the one we were born in and we spent all our time there? If our mind, which houses all of our emotions, memory and feelings; if that could be tricked into this ‘2^nd reality’, then couldn’t we argue that it is a reality? Most would disagree, most would say that Earth our planet and our universe which we can see everyday is reality. I would argue that it isn’t and that the term ‘reality’ is something subjective. When I was on those forums I completely dedicated myself to the worlds on there. Yes I knew that I was on a computer typing words to strangers far away but my imagination was what broke down the barriers. If you’re presented a world of your imagination with no perceivable barriers then who is to say that you aren’t occupying a different reality?

The Oxford dictionary’s definition of reality is ‘the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them.’ So if we have a world made in a computer does it actually exist? Yes. Why? Because instead of atoms creating the world, it is now code (which technically is still made up of atoms just in a different way than we perceive). So any world made in ‘the Nether’ ‘technically’ is a reality. It is just up to you on far of a reality you define it. Reality is the state of things as they exist and the best example I could give you is this. If I took a child who was from the 1% of wealth in this world and took them to where the worst of the 99% lived. Their reality will have changed. Ignorance would have protected them from the horrors of poverty, disease and corruption. They would now know of those things and how they would choose to act on them would be up to them. But in the end their reality has ‘grown’ or ‘changed’.

lovetheatre.com

What makes ‘The Nether’ so interesting, is that rather than focusing on some magic world filled with elves and dragons (a memorable quote from the script is ‘have you fucked an elf before?’) it focuses on ‘the Hideaway’ a place which is similar to online forum role-play but with a darker twist. It focuses on paedophilia without resorting to graphic imagery. In ‘the Hideaway’ people get to choose from a selection of avatars and may either be adults or if lucky to be chosen, one of the cast of children who gets abused in this world. Naturally it’s wrong for this content to exist as a reality in the ‘real-world’ but here it’s all managed, used and created by adults. No actual child steps foot in the world, rather old men choose to be the children being molested. This then throws more questions into the mix. If I were to create a Netherworld, and the idea of freedom of speech exists (or in this case; creation), who is to say that the ‘creation’ should be messed with, regardless of its contents? If I adhere to ‘the Nether’ rules, surely no matter how depraving the content is, it’s still legal? It is a reality I chose to create and as such, most of us in today’s society would agree it shouldn’t be tampered with. No one should have a right to determine our dreams and imagination - But I’m being hypocritical. I hate and disagree with child molestation and paedophilla as much as the next person and would obviously want it removed from ‘reality’. But if there was a place where no ‘real’ child existed and only the images were there, that meant that the acts no longer happened in THIS reality, in THIS society, is that wrong to remove? Does it not act as a way for these people to express themselves without harming anyone?

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Here lies the conundrum, the main character who hates the whole idea of ‘The Nether’ ends up falling in love with one of the children (who is an actually a really old physics professor) loves the child, has sex with her (who is actually a him) captivated by the beauty and the freedom of ‘the hideaway’. The creator of the Hideaway ‘Papa’ states that because he has ‘the nether’ to escape to, he has never physically molested a child. He almost did and to prevent it from happening again he created ‘the Hideaway’.  Yet the main character continues on her path of taking the ‘Hideaway’ down.  This could all be construed as me saying that even imagery of paedophilia is acceptable. Which is not what I am saying at all. What I am saying is that for you to question reality and imagine a world in which ‘the Nether’ exists, to imagine a place where you could PHYSICALLY be a part of YOUR imagination, even if it‘s an imagination we don’t agree with, do we have the right to destroy that, to impose our will on others? If this reality has things you don’t agree with but means that in the “physical earth world” those practices will stop happening, is it okay to destroy this ‘nether’ reality and therefore force it back upon the real-world? I can’t tell you the answer since the world is not black or white and ‘the nether’ shows us just how blurred the lines and definitions of reality and morality really can be.

But I can tell you that I stand fast behind the argument that the ‘Nether worlds’ are in fact, realities and that, makes it hard for me to stomach the idea of destroying them. I’m glad to have found a play that explores just this, making us question our every moral, delve into our own definitions of reality and ultimately explore what will inevitably be, our future.

For a review of the production itself, head over here: http://watchinabitotheatrenstuff.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/the-nether-at-duke-of-yorks-theatre.html