That Is Not Who I Am
Royal Court | ★★★★✩
You know how tedious it is when a child lies and you believe them and then they triumphantly declare, “Fooled you!” Well, something of that annoyance hangs over the Royal Court’s latest play.
News that the theatre has devoted its main stage to an unknown playwright’s debut work created some fuss. From material released by the theatre we knew that the play’s urgent theme was digital identity theft and that it was written by Dave Davidson who had worked in the security industry for 38 years. Images of the writer were withheld, however, such are the security concerns when blowing the lid on the dark arts of online crime – or so we were led to believe.
All this is a lie, says an apologetic written statement projected on to the stage at the beginning of Lucy Morrison’s production.
It is here that I am going to give you a choice. You can either stop reading this review and avoid the spoilers that will deny you some, though not all, of the dizzying misdirection embedded in this show. Or you can read on about a play that, in the fake news era, uses deceit to force questions about truth and who tells it.
Still here? So the real title of the show is Rapture, says the announcement, and it is written not by an unknown playwright but one of the world’s best-known dramatists Lucy Kirkwood, whose works include Chimerica, the brilliant political thriller whose mysterious plot is rooted in the Tiananmen Square massacre. This time Kirkwood’s subject is the “controversial” story of Noah and Celeste Quilter, a nurse and former soldier who met through The Guardian’s dating app and are played here to likeable perfection by Siena Kelly and Jake Davies.
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Siena Kelly portrays the role of nurse Celeste Quilter to likeable perfection (Photo: Manuel Harlan)
Things get progressively trickier. The play will be narrated by Kirkwood herself, or would have, explains actor Priyanga Burford, had Kirkwood’s “condition” not made her particularly vulnerable to the forces who may wish to prevent this play from being seen; forces who may be behind covert recordings of Noah and Celeste’s daily life; forces which may be connected to the Home Secretary’s move to block publication of the report into the Quilters’ death.
What follows is dramatised reportage. Using the recordings, Kirkwood and this production’s team (the presence of stagehands in the wings reinforce the show’s journalistic imperative) have exhaustively pieced together the Quilters’ life, revealing how they evolved into potent online revolutionaries.
The tense result disturbingly suggests that this country’s establishment is willing to murder those who it sees as a threat. In fact the sense that this is a samizdat show is so strong you may feel you have involuntarily shared some of the risk being taken by those on stage. Or you might have if you hadn’t read this far.
Not to worry. Kirkwood’s play still works on many levels, particularly the one that forces us to question our most trusted sources of information. It also keeps its audience off-balance by subverting everything a play is normally thought be. You’ll get a lot of it. Trust me.
