September 19, 2004, 12.12pm • 27 comments » • 2,583 Views

Virtual theatre shows the faux real

If, like me, you’ve spent the best part of nine years dabbling in chat rooms, message boards and virtual communities, but have tended to keep the social life on the screen distinct from the real life behind it, such interactions may seem entirely virtual.

For all the talk of “rooms”, “spaces” and “worlds”, these seem like merely metaphors for navigating 2D textual environments in which multi-layered relations must arise from personal linkages in text alone.

A Czech play, changes all that. Performed this week at Cardiff’s Chapter last night, Chat - Dangerously Easy Liaisons explores the phenomenon of the internet chatroom and relationships developed within.

Chat pushes the spatial metaphors on which virtual spaces trade into the real space of the theatre stage, to test whether they hold up and to make the offline audience aware of the evolving personal communication media.

To anyone familiar with chat rooms and message boards, the devices are instantly recognisable. Each character has a nickname, each uses bad grammar, the dialogue is pitched invariably at obtaining sex or love (because the chatroom window is a window into our core personal desire).

That Chat conveys this in the real world is fascinating. Using an array of mixed media including human beatboxing, eastern European hiphop, video cameras, an imitation radio stationand child-like Flash animations, chat room dialogue is beamed onto a projection wall in the centre of the stage as the protagonist, Zorro DX, and his would-be beau Marylou (both from Prague) sit, typing and dimly sit, at equidistant corners of the stage space.

They’re dialogue is accompanied and annoyed by that of invisible others in their room, such that they seek a private space. Here, a private room is constructed, literally, with sound effects and and savvy stage production, by removing the projection wall and instead constructing a personal square of light in the centre of the stage, occupied only by the two central characters.

It is just one of the very visual and surprising transformations that, taking place before your eyes, reclaims the spatial metaphors stolen by virtual environments. Yes, there may be three computers on the stage, but they are peripheral; here, it is the highlighted metaphor-brought-alive that is the real, and the reality of the keyboard, with its textual limitations is the fantasy on the margins.

It’s faithfully true to the form of the subject matter. When inhabitants of a chat room go on “a virtual holiday” that would normally be constructed in line-by-line text fantasy, their consensual hallucination is constructed on stage using a computer image of a cockpit, occupied by the two protagonists who effortlessly shimmy on the chairs from their computer desks to the helm of a passenger jet, before the talk invariably turns to backrubs on the beach.

This marvellous direction is all concerned with proximity, invisibility, fantasy and desire, constructing physical spaces that mimic the virtual (which, in turn trade on the physical).

And it deals with the obvious limitations of chat… the inevitable concern as to whether the image you have constructed of your sexy chat partner may turn out to be nothing more than a builder from Boston. At one point, Zorro DX asks rhetorically: “What if she’s just a little grey dormouse playing exhibitionist on the net? What am I doing playing exihibitionist on the net?” And, when Marylou asks his age, he answers: “As old as you want me to be.” Later, the screen is flashed momentarily with the statement: “Only made-up things exist”. It’s an escalating romance that points to how we all use the screen as a creative, escapist fantasy.

The irony? Though they share the same stage space, Zorro DX and Marylou are virtual to the audience, always remote from each other at the keyboard. The tragedy? Despite efforts to the contrary, they never meet. The virtual stays virtual.