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by Jennifer Haley, directed by Luke Brown

Theatre Aquarius, Dofasco Centre, Hamilton

October 26-November 12, 2016

“A life outside of consequence”

Theatre Aquarius has scored a major coup in presenting the Canadian premiere of The Nether.  American playwright Jennifer Haley’s brilliant play from 2013 is an intellectual thriller set in the future concerning the ethics of internet role-playing games.  The issues the play raises are vital and the manner in which Haley raises them is riveting.  The production values are so high, the acting so strong and the direction so incisive that the show would not be out of place on Broadway or the West End. 

The action is set in the near future when use of the internet has encompassed even more territory in people’s lives than it does at present.  Most children “go to school” online since offline schools have become so expensive.  The main contact people have with nature is by experiencing it through online simulations.  Some people have become so entranced with life online that they become “shades” living on life support in the real world while they spend all their time online in their fictional favourite world.  The internet itself is now called the Nether and has its own police force to combat criminal activity in the virtual world.   

Haley has given her play the form of a mystery.  Detective Morris (Andrea Runge) has arrested two men for illegal activities taking place online.  Mr. Sims (Randy Hughson) has set up an area of the Nether so heavily encrypted that the police don’t have access to it.  Sims’s special area is known as “The Hideaway” and Morris wants Sims to reveal the location of Sims private server so that his site can be shut down.  The other man Morris interrogates in isolation from Sims is Mr. Doyle, a teacher, who was arrested because it was noticed that he was a such a frequent visitor to The Hideaway.  Morris wants to know all Doyle can tell her about the place and about Sims.  She also wants to know why he has arranged to “cross over”, i.e. become a shade and remain permanently in The Hideaway.

Sims is completely forthright about why he created The Hideaway.  He admits outright that he is “sick”.  He recognized early on that he was sexually attracted to children, but found that none of the medical or psychological treatments available could cure him of his desires.  He therefore created a virtual world online where he could act out his desires without harming anyone in the real world.  The Hideaway is set in the Victorian period with a large mansion surrounded by poplars and is in essence a brothel with children as the prostitutes. 

The most important point, however, is that no real children are allowed to enter Sims’s world.  Everyone who logs into The Hideaway must be an adult.  There online, as in every online game, everyone appears only as an avatar or electronic image.  Thus, the adult users, who are all anonymous, appear in The Hideaway as either adults or children depending on what avatar they choose.  The only user who actually looks like the real user is Mr. Sims himself who appears in The Hideaway in the guise of Papa, the brothel owner. 

Sims tells Morris that the purpose of The Hideaway is to provide people like himself with “a life outside of consequence”.  He and other users of the site can indulge in their perversions as avatars without harming real children.  According to Sims, his site provides a safety valve for perverse desires so that the users will  not act on them in the real world. 

As anyone with teens or pre-teens will know, anyone today can log into an online game under a pseudonym, choose an avatar and interact with the avatars of other people who have logged in.  The vast majority of these games involve one group trying to destroy another and players accumulates points based on how many people of the opposing group they has maimed, killed or injured.  Some adults only games include rape and torture.  This game-playing is already “a life outside of consequence” because any of the dead or injured avatars immediately come back to life again for the next game. 

All Haley has done is to shift the focus of the disturbing content of some online games from killing to having sex with minors.  What makes her play so intriguing is why we should find activity in The Hideaway so abhorrent when we seem oblivious to children in our own day playing at mass murder.   

Just as people today have tried to prove that playing violent online games correlates with violent behaviour in the real world, Haley has Morris claim that Sims’s Hideaway does not act as a safety valve but rather encourages people to indulge in unacceptable behaviour that only prepares them for action in the real world.  In fact, Morris has sent an agent undercover into The Hideaway to report on whether what happens there has any real world consequences.

The way the action of the play is presented is simply stunning.  The shallow all-grey interrogation room at the very front of the stage is oppressive.  But scenes shift between Morris interviewing Sims or Doyle and scenes occurring in The Hideaway.  Via the magic of Sean Nieuwenhuis’s fantastic projections, we seem to enter into the internet and the back wall of Douglas Paraschuck’s set opens to reveal the verdant Victorian world of The Hideaway on a raised level behind it.  The soft golden light designer Martin Conboy shines on it contrasts completely with the harsh, clinical lighting he uses for the interrogation room.  Despite its malign purpose, the design team has ensured that scenes in The Hideaway have a fairytale beauty about them.   

Anyone who knows the Bible will realize that this depiction is fully justified.  We read “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light” (NASB: 2 Corinthians 11:14).  This it is perfectly logical that Sims’s paradise and the people in it should appear beautiful.  Everything in this virtual world is a fiction and everyone who appears in it has literally taken on an appealing disguise as someone else.  Morris’s investigation into Sims’s false paradise may seem straightforward, but Haley has a couple plot twists in store that are truly mind-blowing.

Director Luke Brown has kept the pacing of the action taut and the tension visibly mounts during the interrogation scenes.  We look to the deceptively pleasant Hideaway scenes for confirmation or rebuttal of what we have heard from Sims’s and Doyle’s interviews.  The interplay between the two worlds is fascinating. 

Brown has drawn fully committed performances from the entire cast.  Andrea Runge, in what may be her best ever performance, presents Detective Morris initially as an over-confident officer with an holier-than-thou attitude toward Sims and Doyle.  Yet, Runge also suggests a fragility beneath this façade that prepares us for the moment when it will shatter.

Randy Hughson, taking a welcome break from playing all the comic old men he has been assigned at the Stratford Festival for the past nine years, obviously relishes the chance to play such an ambiguous character as Sims.  Hughson presents Sims’s arguments for the usefulness of The Hideaway so calmly and persuasively that we struggle to form counterarguments in our minds, most of which Morris later expresses.  There are aspects about The Hideaway’s impact that Sims refuses to acknowledge, but Hughson shows us subtly that as the interrogation continues some of Morris’s questions starts to gnaw at Sims much as he would like to deny it.  As “Papa” in The Hideaway, Hughson gives us a man who is all warmth and comfort who gives out only the gentlest reminders that there are punishments for breaking the rules of The Hideaway.

Nigel Shawn Williams plays Doyle as a pathetic broken old man.  If this is what a player addicted to The Hideaway is like in reality, we need no more negative example that this.  Williams shows us with great effect how emotionally overwrought Doyle’s sojourns in The Hideaway have made him .  Williams gives Doyle’s decision to abandon real life at age 65 to live permanently in an online world the chilling impact of a death wish. 

Tim Funnell ably plays an avatar visitor to The Hideaway who goes by the name of Mr. Woodnut.  As per the Victorian setting he is scrupulously polite and well mannered.  Because Mr. Woodnut seems uninterested in pursuing any of the enticements in the The Hideaway we begin to suspect that this may be an avatar assumed by someone we know or have heard of.  the question that nags at us throughout the action is “Who is he really?”  Funnell subtly suggests how a suspicious disparity grows between how a visitor’s avatar is supposed to act and how he as an avatar does act.

Grade 6 student Mary-Maria Bourdeau gives a remarkably assured performance as the girl Iris, who happens to be Papa’s favourite in The Hideaway.  Bourdeau successfully combines the twin ideals of innocence and seductiveness that Sims has programmed into the child avatars he designed. 

Theatre Aquarius must be commended not only for its braveness in programming such a daring play but for its success in producing it at such a high artistic level.  The play may be set in the near future, but the questions it raises about the content of internet games and about the relation of the online and real worlds are questions people have to confront now.  The play not only presents a fascinating mystery in itself but also serves as a useful springboard for discussion.  Theatre Aquarius’ production, one of the best in its history, is so good and its questions so important that one wishes a producer would appear to take this show to other major cities across the country.  Meanwhile, anyone in Hamilton or within striking distance of it should make a beeline to Theatre Aquarius to see this dazzling production of such a thought-provoking play. 

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: (from top) Andrea Runge and Nigel Shawn Williams; Tim Funnell and Mary-Maria Bourdeau; Randy Hughson and Mary-Maria Bourdeau. ©2016 Bank Media.

For tickets, visit http://theatreaquarius.org.