Hacktivist London gets a sympathetic hearing at the Royal Court
The scandal of celebrity pictures hacked from iCloud has obscured the idealism of the 'hacktivist' revolution dramatised by Tim Price at the Royal Court, writes Lucy Brooks
FROM OUR PREVIEWS: The scandal of celebrity pictures hacked from the Cloud has obscured the idealism of the 'hacktivist' revolution dramatised by Tim Price at the Royal Court, writes Lucy Brooks
Tim Price's new play, Teh Internet is Serious Business , decodes the depths of online opportunism with a fictional re-telling of the real-life 'hacktivists', actually two teenagers from Britain, who infiltrated capitalist corporations.
It's not just a deliberate 'typo', the attention-grabbing title of Tim Price's latest play is also a cunning internet in-joke. For those that aren't 'meme' literate, this sincere-sounding adage is a universal online joke, used as a sarcastic slang to deride those taking things too seriously, or to ironically highlight the very opposite of seriousness. And, as annoying as it looks, the mis-spelt 'the' reflects one of the most frequent errors in an age of lightening fast typing.
The Story...
The shock and bafflement when a relatively small, young and inexperienced pair of individuals with a strong social conscience, operating under the names of Lulzsec and Anonymous, hacked into some of the world's most powerful cooperations (the US Department of Justice, Visa, Sony, the Sun newspaper) provides inspiration for this tale of unlikely friendship, ingenuity and bravery in the internet age. Teh Internet is a Serious Business tells tale of two teenagers who meet online and strike up a friendship – so far, so normal until they end up embroiled with the F.B.I...
The Creatives...
Award-winning playwright Tim Price is renowned for bold, political plays. Protest Song , his politically-charged monologue exploring the Occupy movement, performed with pzazz by Rhys Ifans, established the Price as a keen ventriloquist of contemporary issues. Along with a passion for representing politics, the playwright also has an interest in the subcultures that surround him; the combination of online trends and the morals behind 'hacktivisim' upon which this latest play is built offers fascinating scope, and a different kind of revolution.
This will be the new Royal Court associate director Hamish Pirie’s first time directing at the venue. It's an exciting debut project, and having worked alongside Price three times before, for both smaller Fringe shows and for Donmar Warehouse's Trafalgar Studio season, he is well-suited to the edgy, absorbing writing we expect from Price.
Catch Anonymous and Lulzsec in conversation with academic Gabriella Coleman at the Royal Court on 29th September 2014
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