Guidelines at New Diorama

This show is a modern horror story, a grim fairytale about the evils of social media and its pernicious grip on our being.

There were even dark forces at play.

Like all the best horror, the violence and harm is never actually shown. It is held within us, triggered in our imagination. Implicit and whispered in recessed alcoves but never spoken out loud.

There’s a frog. A frog in the forest. A frog in the forest born with eyes in its mouth. A frog in the forest born with eyes in its mouth, forced to look at life through its open mouth.

“I’m worried about you”

We sit in the dark, listening to a voice note, from a mother. We hear the emotional strain in her voice. She is masking her fear. Fear that she doesn’t understand her daughter or the world she exists within, scared that a misplaced word with drive her further into the abyss of the device she spends so long staring into. Have you seen that video of the girls in the forest? Please don’t look at it.

Two smartly-dressed women burst into the space, annunciating corporate-speak, close into microphones, addressing the audience, making eye-contact, slickly extolling the virtues of their online platform. They talk of inclusion, of community, of support and of trust. Consent is simple, Just tick this box to agree. They explain the ‘guidelines’. You may not post anything that could harm others, glamourise eating disorders, incite terrorism… unless, of course, it is framed in a positive way to help our community. We are here to help and inspire our community. We don’t talk about the video of the girls in the forest.

Two girls share dance routines and a Babybel. They dare each other to eat the outer case. It must be safe, it feels wrong that ‘they’ would let something harmful come into contact with food. The girls recall the online-safety talk at school. It was so lame, ‘they’ just don’t understand anything.

Two girls sit together on a patch of grass, close to a forest. They discuss that online video of the girls in the forest. One is repulsed and couldn’t watch beyond that moment, you know, the point where she did that thing with the cup, that was filled with…  The other is intrigued by it, enthralled, beguiled, even affirmed by it. She does think she could smash someone’s head in with a rock.

Two girls in period dress, maybe it’s the 17th Century, discover an illuminated presence in the forest. It’s forbidden fruit, it’s Pandora’s box, it’s whatever the modern equivalent must be: the internet.

Alex and Aoife at New Diorama, either side of the Guidelines poster.

I’ve never seen a bad show at New Diorama. This was one of the best.

Brilliantly staged with a minimal set (of mostly school gym ropes, a square of grass and some draped gold cloth) the lighting and impeccable sound design brought the unsettling atmosphere, drew you in and doom-scrolled you between moving images.

Performers Rachel Leah-Hosker and Alex McCauley were brilliant in their many guises.

It’s the first production from Conglomerate (Pip Williams and James Nash). I will definitely be following them online to see what comes next.