Midnight Movie

There’s a thing that happens to me. It started about eight years ago. If I wake up between 4 and 5 in the morning, my head is almost immediately flooded with the most horrible thoughts, thoughts that, in the light of day, I think are baseless: that I am about to die, that I am evil, worthless, that I am despised by everyone, that nothing I do is any good. I have to put music on or force my mind to concentrate hard on some neutral memory or topic or else I will lie there, filled with horror for an hour. As I say, in the morning, even only an hour or so later, these feelings and thoughts melt away and have no grip on me, but between 4 and 5 is the very witching hour of night. It feels like an hour where the distinction between truth and falsehood dissolves, where I am gripped by the worst possible interpretation of my actions, my value, my future.

This liminal zone between waking and sleeping, between truth and falsehood, resembles some experiences of the internet. Ideas bombard us in so disorderly a way that it becomes hard to organise these thoughts into a reasonable sequence or structure. Sometimes we find ourselves sifting information purely by confirmation bias: this idea chimes with what I believe so it is reliable, that idea is incompatible with my beliefs so it is propaganda. We have all done it; in fact, confirmation bias is a useful way of sifting the world - thought the better your understanding of the world already is, the more reliable confirmation bias is. If you have a wise and generous and subtle and diverse view of human beings and their motivations, you are likely to be able to spot frauds and bullshitters. Of course, if you have a pinched and jaundiced view, confirmation bias will just triage sense experience to encourage you in your prejudice. The internet offers us every view imaginable, so as we sift, so we are confirmed in what we already think. Truth and falsehood lag behind the forceful power of the attention-grabbing opinion. The internet exists in a twilight of truth values.

It seems to me that this is, in part, what Eve Leigh is talking about in Midnight Movie. The play unfolds ‘between midnight and dawn’. We watch a series of exchanges between … who? They’re not characters. Leigh describes them as avatars. They’re like the characters you create to send into a computer game. They are our representatives (and hers). They are two people and one: the conversations they have feel like the impossibly distant anonymous exchanges of an online chatroom or messaging service (thousand of miles apart) or the fevered conversations you might have with yourself in the witching hour (a synapse apart). There’s a hallucinatory quality to that which reminds me of a dream (‘you were in the dream but you were also two people…’). And indeed the whole production feels like a nightmare, with its jarring, agitating colour palette, its alarming shifts and clashes of style, its juddering clashes of scale (there’s a bed upstage that is unsettling in its dimensions, its apparent clash with perspective), its suffocating darkness, its glaring brightness, its impossible inside-outness, its lurches from laughter to horror, from misery to exuberance. Midnight Movie is the midnight movie in all our heads, playing as we pass between deep sleeping and head towards the light.

How to describe it? It’s a series of experiences, conversations, paranoid delusions, stories and music. Yes, music: the soundtrack to the whole thing is Janelle Monáe’s mindfuckingly wonderful, Prince-reincarnated, polysexual, polyfunky single ‘Make Me Feel’. The song is sampled and distorted and grabbed and groped and thrown about right the way through the whole thing, like it’s playing on your phone by the bed and infiltrating your dreams. It also represents an important part of Midnight Movie, which is a reaching beyond the pain and despair to something utterly liberated, something beyond all confinements, beyond being trapped in your head, in your body, finding a place where you are never in the wrong place. Without this vision of freedom, the show would be too dark to bear. Of course, against the light of that almost-impossible horizon, the show is also almost too dark to bear.

So, come on then, how to describe it? Nadia Nadarajah and Tom Penn are on stage pretty much the whole time. They are the avatars and they tell each other stories. Some of these are internet memes (like the weird story of the death of Elisa Lam); others are mythical stories (probably); others are personal stories (probably). There are urban myths, horror stories, legends, news stories, anecdotes and sometimes these stories jump tracks from one to the other halfway through. (Oddly, it reminded me of a very different play, but Caryl Churchill’s Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp, which shares with this a fascination with how the mythic intertwines with our ordinary lives. In fact while we’re on this topic, so does Annie Baker’s The Antipodes. This has been a year of worrying about story.) And the show is also trying to find a theatrical form for representing the internet or our experience of it, with its bombardment and surfing and confusion of real and fake and of the serious and the trivial and the way we have 40 tabs open at any one time like a million people are shouting stories at you as you sleep. We’ve been here before a bit with Tim Price’s Teh Internet is Serious Business, though while that wanted us to think more broadly and publicly about the international politics of the internet, this is about the experiential, personal, subjective feeling of what it’s like to be trapped and freed in a digital body.)

I do love a theatre show that seems quite unlike anything I’ve seen before and yet also, somehow, captures something about who we are now and that’s what this does.

Crucial though is the mode of storytelling. Nadia Nadarajah performs in BSL, but also dances, while Tom Penn speaks in English, and also drums. (Yes, drums! There are drums in this! There should be more drums in things.) Much of the text is projected on the wall, along with a near-constant stream of recorded and live images and sound. (The sound: buzzes and pulses and glitches and screams.) There does not appear to be a particularly clear continuity of character; at some moments they seem to be figures miles apart in an internet relationship where she gives him RT instructions to carry out. But sometimes they seem to be just mates telling each other stories. And sometimes they seem to be the same person; there’s a particular moment towards the end, where Tom is speaking and Nadia is signing and they are both telling the same story and whose story it is starts to dissolve. Is it Tom’s story that Nadia is signing? Is it Nadia’s story that Tom is voicing? Is it one of the avatar’s stories? A character’s story? Is it Eve Leigh’s story? Is it more than one of these? The edges of identity seem to blur and split and open up.

Because again, this is a play about liberation. I found the show claustrophobic and dark and brutal, maybe just because of my own night horrors (confirmation bias), but I can also see that there’s a vision of freedom in the digital body - that cluster of bytes and pixels and cookies and traces that we scatter across the web. Particularly because of the emphasis on disability - the way that the wrong places can make you feel you have the wrong body, the way theatres are brilliant because you have to be ‘there’, but terrible because sometimes ‘there’ is the wrong place for your body - there’s something about being able to move beyond the confines of the body, to go from analogue to digital body and reach out that is valuable and exciting here, even though the show also knows how compromised that is.

Artistically, these devices are theatrically thrilling. The words on the wall duplicate or are duplicated by BSL which duplicate or are duplicated by English. It displaces the action of the play; where is the ‘central’ point of expression here? It’s nowhere; this is a decentred play. (This is like any play, of course, which is not fully expressed on the page or the stage, and Leigh makes much of her absent presence, the play being her own avatar.) I loved moments where Tom Penn, maybe accidentally, voicing the words that are projected on the wall, slightly diverged from the projected text and we felt there a gap between analogue and digital, flesh and data, between theatre and media, live and recorded. At one moment - I’m sure an accident - we’re hearing a story about a man watching a website to discover whether his brother died in prison; as the story continued, the projected words talk about ‘his brother’ but Tom said ‘his wife’ before correcting himself… and suddenly a forking path opened up, another story arose from the play like a soul leaving a body.

Did I like it? Well yes. I mean, I found it hard and unsettling for all the reasons I’ve mentioned. I don’t share Leigh’s conviction that fiction is an irresponsible delusion in theatre and I found a few moments of the show a bit arch, and others a bit self-regarding, but hell that’s also the social media transmit mode. What I loved in Rachel Bagshaw’s production is that it simultaneously deprives you of comfort while generously giving you everything else and that felt like it captured something of what it’s like to be us now. I find Eve Leigh’s work personally very sympathetic (indeed, though it’s completely different, my own play Static shares with Midnight Movie a desire to do something difficult and theatrical with BSL and indeed with Leigh’s earlier play The Trick a desire to talk about magic and grief; Leigh is a completely different writer, of course, but I do feel myself reaching out across the servers). It’s a really bold experiment. It’s full of the feeling of 2019. It’s definitely worth a click.