Teh Internet Is Serious Business review – a high-speed hacktivist adventure

How on earth do you dramatise internet culture, and in particular the disruptive activities of hackers? I’m not sure Tim Price has a definitive answer but his new play, like his earlier The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, blurs fact and fiction and throws a wealth of material at us.

The result is messy, confusing, overlong and yet strangely liberating. I found much of the first half, with its embodiment of the merry mayhem of imageboard sites such as 4chan, totally bewildering. But it gradually becomes clear the play is following the fortunes of two dedicated young hacktivists: Mustafa, a 16-year-old London schoolboy, and Jake, a reclusive 18-year-old Shetlander. We also learn a lot about their involvement in two particular networks, Anonymous and LulzSec. Between them these two internet gatherings hack into a variety of targets, ranging from the Church of Scientology and Fox News to the FBI, before being undermined from inside, with arrests being made.

Teh Internet Is Serious Business (typo intentional) throws up a mass of issues it only partially addresses. If hacktivism can, as in many of the cases cited, be used to attack corporate culture and government agencies, could it not also be deployed against liberal causes? And is it legitimate to turn from exposing organisations to harassing individuals? Price’s answer seems to be that the internet is a neutral facility, impossible to control or censor. Even if that is open to question, however, the play captures the teeming chaos of cyberspace and dramatises the reality of a global network of bright young people dedicated to challenging existing values. At one point someone says: “You’re just a bunch of geeks in basements.” Price suggests they can also be the instinctive enemies of bigotry, greed and oppression.

It’s hard to convey the play’s kaleidoscopic tumult, but Hamish Pirie’s production harnesses its formidable energy, with the help of Chloe Lamford’s design, built around a sunken pit of brightly coloured balls. And in a 15-strong cast, there are striking contributions from Hamza Jeetooa and Kevin Guthrie as Mustafa and Jake, and from Nathaniel Martello-White and Eileen Walsh, who effortlessly play everything from anonymous hackers and memes to identifiable people. If there is dynamic movement in the piece, it comes in the progress from “nothing is to be taken seriously” to the idea embodied in the title. And I can only say that, as an analogue-trained hack, I found its portrait of a world of digital activism both enlightening and unexpectedly touching.