“Privacy” – A play by James Graham

Privacy by James Graham

The Donmar Warehouse – until 31st May 2014

Are you really who you think you are? The power of technology and its ultimately sinister and intrusive consequences are revealed in James Graham’s new play. The story is both engaging and alarming as the inventive cast take on multiple roles and interact with the audience. Please ensure your mobile devices are switched on in order to participate.

“How can the internet know me if I don’t know myself” ponders the writer asked to create a play about the power of the internet and how it shapes and controls everybody’s lives. What transpires is how, by using mobile phones and other devices, the contemporary time-poor population has surrendered itself to the kingdom of Google, Apple, Microsoft and beyond. Home, the symbol of safety in the pre-tech age, no longer exists as Google Earth spies on the world.

Privacy evokes Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful film The Conversation made 40 years ago and 24 years before the birth of Google. In the film Gene Hackman plays a surveillance agent, obsessed about his own privacy. Ultimately the messages are the same – we have no control over our lives. Unlike Gene Hackman’s character, who only uses pay phones (mobile phones did not exist in 1974), most of us surrender our lives willingly to the powers of the internet and thus surveillance. How many of us have actually read the terms and conditions for iTunes which is apparently as long as The Tempest?

Unless you shun all electronic contraptions, never go online or exist in some small space in the Amazon basin, which is electro magnetic safe, then Privacy should be compulsory viewing for everybody – especially teenagers who have known no other world.