The Nether: when Sims explore their basest urges
14 Oct 2018

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Tim Leyes

The Nether is a crime procedural set in the near future when life online has supplanted life in a bleak reality. It is also a prediction that those Sims who seem so cute and harmless will eventually, if not already, begin indulging their darkest and most perverse instincts.

Playwright Jennifer Haley is primarily concerned with the question of what is moral and/or permissible online and in fantasy. What is real? What are the consequences of role playing? It is a delicate and frequently troubling area to explore, there are many things that we do casually online - from trolling to dating profile hyperbole to porn consumption - that we would be unlikely to do in real life. Haley ups the ante by presenting Papa who runs a bordello for pedophiles called The Hideaway. 

Haley's vision of the future is teased out as we learn more about the characters and their dilemma. And both sides are presented as morally, potentially, superior which makes for occasionally queasy viewing. Before entering the theatre, great pains were taken to make sure that each audience member read and understood that

Warning: while nothing graphic whatsoever happens onstage, The Nether has violent and sexually explicit content, including rape, murder, suicide and pedophilia, that may be deeply disturbing to some. Please be advised.

While the creep factor is high with anything to do with pedophilia, there is a further twist involving an axe that is truly horrifying, as the blade scraped across the floor, the entire audience cringed. And that isn't all Haley is concerned with, The Nether probes glancingly but with force into gender roles, sexual fluidity, climate change, whether role play is a safe release or an encouraging stimulant, and the price of fantasy. At one point the characters and their avatars share the stage and it is initially disconcerting as that blurred line of reality that Haley is exploring has been erased.

Director Peter Pasyk (Sisters, The Circle, Late Company) and set designer Patrick Lavender (The Circle) set the action in two interlocking and telescoping spaces, one presumably the real world and the other locked in a server. The real world is defined by beams of light and a chair while the online is richly detailed and colourful courtesy of scarily just-too-realistic projections by Nick Bottomley. We understand the seductiveness even if we don't share, understand or condone the desire. 

The cat and mouse exchanges of the investigation are between Catherine Cullen as the authority figure and David Storch (Cake and Dirt, Arigato,Tokyo) as The Hideaway's creator, and then Cullen and Robert Persichini (Category E) who is one of the clients. Storch rages and cajoles, and is as smooth and slippery with Cullen as he is, in a quite different and disturbing way, with Hannah Levinson (Fun Home, The Sound of Music). Persichini's character wants to become a "shade" and end his existence in real life to live online. He blusters and struggles, and is charmingly, horrifyingly amoral. Persichini is so good that a major twist and reveal, reframes his performance and makes it all the more shocking and creepy.

Levinson is spunky and straddles the line between avatar seductress and innocent child in a way that makes the skin crawl. It is a precocious performance but that may just be concerns for her mental health by inhabiting such a dark space. Her sparring and romantic partner is the also just-too-realistic in his casual masculine appeal Mark McGrinder (The Normal Heart, Clybourne Park). He is as close to a romantic hero as The Nether will allow, and his conflict of choosing between duty and unwanted desire in a morally ambiguous world(s) flits across his face in a terrifying manner. All of the cast has to play double layers as an ensemble and, no small feat, make it crystal clear.

The warning proves all too apt, The Nether is uncomfortable theatre full of ideas that induce squirming and afterthought. McGrinder says, in a play where trees are a tragic metaphor, "You can only hear the wind if it has leaves to blow through." For the first time in memory, as the lights came up after the curtain call, not a single person reached to check their phone. There are consequences to spending too much of one's life online, The Nether shows them to us.