Hacked at Theatre 503

Hacked at Theatre 503

30 September, 2011
by: CatherineSpoonfed

Theatre 503's collection of plays linked to the phone-hacking scandal are intriguing but lack unity, says Catherine Love.

It’s an unusual formula for a piece of theatre. Six volunteers hand over the contents of their voicemail to Theatre 503, providing the material for six short plays by different writers. This is the idea behind Hacked, Theatre 503’s latest foray into collaborative writing, following the likes of Coalition and Decade. The provocative title is a deliberate reference to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, the controversial impetus for this collection of plays, although the playwrights involved do not so much address the phone-hacking as skirt intriguingly around it.


Curators Lisa Cagnacci and Derek Bond have given their six playwrights a relatively free rein, and it shows. Aside from the fact that all the pieces are built around voicemail messages, there is no other common thread to be found running through the evening. A number of the plays have chosen to probe issues of privacy and other ramifications of the activity in which they are engaged, while others – like Anna Jordan’s sweet two-hander Showmance and the heart-achingly realistic Still from Marcelo dos Santos – are bite-sized playlets crafted around the imagined lives of the volunteers who have surrendered up their messages.


The evening kicks off with Matt Hartley’s sharp, hilarious satire Rewind, a canny choice to open the proceedings. An excellent sketch in its own right, crisply performed by Scott Christie and Abigail Andjel, it also makes a pertinent point about how easily innocuous fact can be spun into fantastic fiction, as two voicemail interceptors translate a mind-numbingly dull message into a terrorist threat. Unfortunately the conclusion cannot match the punchy start; Ben Ellis’ haunting offering that closes the evening plays with fascinating ideas of identity in the modern world, but never fully pursues them, and breaks up his piece into a fragmented and distracting collection of miniature scenes.


The most interesting pieces straddle the middle of the programme, coming from Dominic Cavendish and Dawn King. Cavendish’s A View of the Zoo could do with a little sharpening up, but succeeds in making a sinister point nonetheless, asking questions about who really owns voicemail messages and how much these messages might be worth to us – capitalism at its coldest. Dinosaur, meanwhile, takes the modern culture of sharing to extremes, imagining a world where everyone’s lives are broadcast on a constant ‘feed’, examining the importance we place on both the public and the private and pondering where our demands for transparency in politics might eventually lead us.


Phone-hacking is far from the only idea at play here; often it is not even the central theme. This is not necessarily a flaw, and there is no doubt that the topical springboard has inspired some interesting theatre, but the overall result is inevitably bitty and might have benefited from the unity of a loose brief for the writers. Despite the set’s tabloid newspaper cladding, acting as a constant visual reminder of why we are here, these plays do not go as far as they might in exploring ideas of privacy, invasion and the psychology of eavesdropping. Hacked is an engaging, compelling and often very funny ride, but the destination is never quite clear.

Hacked runs at Theatre 503 until 4 October.

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CatherineSpoonfed