The story starts in a nearly empty room on a Zoom call. If that sounds familiar, well, so it should. During lockdown, it’s been pretty much the only place a story could start. Gone are the old possibilities of stories that start in the flesh. Now it’s all Slack conversations, virtual backgrounds and people searching for the unmute button. Any one of us could be the person in a nearly empty room.
Depending on your tolerance for more of the same, Nathan Ellis’s Zoom-based work_from_home is either a nightmare of laptop alienation or a satirical vision of a society gazing in wonder at its own strangeness. For its wit and adventurousness, I go for the latter.
Formally, the play recalls David Greig’s short two-hander Fragile in which the audience, reading from a screen, played one of the characters. Ellis, who has something of Greig’s ironic sense of humour, goes one step further by doing away with actors altogether. Probably not what Equity wants to hear right now, but the stars of this New Diorama theatre and Incoming festival production are us.
And rather good we are, too. Fed lines by an officious “chat function”, we become an online community mesmerised by a social media brand manager who, having been frozen in digital limbo, is now a viral sensation. People log on just to stare. If that wasn’t self-referential enough, there’s also a theatre director responding to these “unprecedented times” by showcasing “ordinary people doing nothing digitally”.
An adaptation of Ellis’s recent show work.txt, it mixes existential soul-searching with wry comedy, tempered by the quiet cry of a world yearning to reinvent itself.
• Performances until 3 July.
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