The perils of living your life online are examined in this play that’s both written and performed by Alex Lodge and Cherie Jacobson.

There are great riches open to dramatists wanting to explore this whole new world where, like theatre, people can pretend to be someone they’re not. That’s one of the angles Nucking Futs goes into in this story of two sisters, one of whom has become obsessed with blogging, tweeting, self publishing online and virtual romance.

Cleo (Jacobson) hires a documentary maker to film her over several months. That includes time spent at the family farm with the comparatively more grounded Diane (Lodge) who tries to keep her big sister away from the internet after an unfortunate incident. But Cleo has a stalker who is exploiting her narcissism. 

One of the problems here is that Cleo is such a total pain. We do feel for her at the end, but this emotion comes too late.

This is the company that brought us the fabulous Tea for Toots and we expected more. On the plus side, there are a lot of laughs along the way, the play does raise legitimate issues and the final twist is clever and satisfying. 

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The dissemination of information around the globe has never been easier than it is now through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs.  But there are many down sides to this global phenomenon, as recent news of online comments about the beleaguered coach of the Auckland rugby franchise the Blues has shown.

It was this negative aspect of social networking that has inspired Cherie Jacobson and Alex Loge, the creators of the offbeat and quirky Tea For Toots seen in 2010, to come up another original but less successful piece of theatre – Nucking Futs, the current early evening show at BATS. 

Cleo Kline (Cherie Jacobson) has written a romantic novel and decides to publish it on line as a way of increasing readership.  To also increase her celebrity status she hires a film crew and so cameraman Chip (Ralph Upton) follows her every move.  She attends a writer’s convention in Whanganui but something happens and so she has to be rescued by her long suffering sister Diane (Alex Lodge) and farmer husband Damo (Nick Zwart) and taken back to their farm in Huntley.

As the audience watches the cameraman watching Cleo, she is blissfully unaware of the impact this is having on her reputation, even when it is pointed out that this type of documentary is a warts and all exposure, she can’t call “cut” when she feels like it. As Cleo’s delusions of grandeur slowly intensify she is blissful unaware that she is becoming a bit of a laughing stock, especially when scammer Trent (Simon Haren) becomes involved.

The humour of the piece is both comic and farcical but also at times rather black, which the cast play out with confidence and lots of energy. Director Ed Watson keeps the pace moving on a simple but creatively constructed set that he also designed.  Cherie Jacobson in the main role of Cleo is particularly good in keeping the momentum of the production moving and is able to create some of the funniest moments in the play.

Lodge, as the put upon sister, makes a good counter point to Jacobson’s effervescence but at times is almost too laid losing clarity of diction. Nevertheless these two with the rest of the cast make an original and unusual piece of theatre very entertaining. 

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The title refers to the central character, Cleo Kline. It’s how people describe her, apparently, although why the citizens of Huntly should spoonerise it is a mystery. It is not a title that captures the essence of the work, however, unless its true purpose is to show how some quaint Kiwi country folk cope with mental illness in the family.

Nucking Futs – from the team that brought us Tea for Toot – is inspired by the phenomenon of independent writers self-publishing e-books online in the virtual (but not exactly virtuous) minefield of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and ‘reality’ television.

Cleo has launched herself with a romance novel called Her Moist Abyss, which involves caving. A subsequent incident at a Whanganui Writers Week Q&A session – captured by way of a prologue – has led to her taking time out to meditate at what she is pleased to call a spiritual retreat and health spa.

She has also hired “a documentary crew to make a self-promotional film about ‘the woman behind the words’,” as the media release puts it. The detail of who is paying what for this is glossed over, but it does become apparent Cleo has not retained any sort of editorial right over what footage gets used and how. She is not allowed to call “cut” and Chip the cameraman keeps saying he can make no promises about what may or may not be used, although it is not clear who he answers to or who holds what rights over the accumulating footage (or do we call it bytes these days?).

When her “polar opposite” sister Diane picks her up from the ‘health spa’ it becomes more apparent that Cleo’s ‘reality’ is not shared by others. But although she is protective of her deluded sister, Diane is too seduced by the camera to be wary of its intrusions, not least because her own quest is to regain her title in the gingerbread construction section of the annual A&P Show baking competition, and a bit of media exposure will not go amiss.

These two roles are well delineated by their creators, Cherie Jacobsen (Cleo) and Alex Lodge (Diane), both extracting some good humour out of the camera’s presence and the way it distorts the ‘reality’ of their behaviour.

Nick Zwart sketches in the underwritten role of Diane’s husband, Damo; a big softy except when assertiveness is required.

The Insecure Writers’ Support Group, convened by Cleo, involves Martha Boo (Kitty August, who also stage manages) and Raoul (Simon Haren) who turns out to be a phantom blogger called Trent. These roughly and unsubtly dramatised sequences serve to expose Cleo’s egotism while offering a cautionary tale about ‘publishers’ who promise the world but ask writers to pay substantial sums for the privilege.

The danger of internet dating also comes into play as a catalyst for bringing Cleo’s idyll to an end, leaving Chip (Ralph Upton) saddled with all the footage and the problem of where to take it. But is this an ending that delivers on the play’s purpose or promise? If the footage is still in the can and has not gone public, let alone viral, what does it matter? There are no consequences for Cleo to deal with or us to conjure with. We are left to wonder who might possibly want it and who has wasted their time and money creating it. Is that the intention of the play?

I find myself wondering if Nucking Futs has suffered from ‘vanity play writing syndrome’ where, because the playwrights have written star roles for themselves and surrounded themselves with ciphers, the story they wanted to write – viz: “to explore how the Internet can feed delusions of grandeur and prey on people’s naivety for the amusement of others” – has no chance of reaching its potential as an exposé of how people use and abuse each other, and self-destruct, in the quest for fame by exploiting the free availability of information as entertainment.

The roles of Chip (representing mass media) and Trent (representing social media) need to be developed as manipulators and exploiters of ‘truth’, with a thoroughly researched credibility that asserts their reality in the context of all the pseudo reality and virtual reality around them.

Perhaps the idea was that we, the audience, would represent the “others” to be amused by “the consequences of going viral” but, apart from the point that nothing does go viral, we are not cast in that role in a way that might make us question the morality of our participation in the network of exploitation.

The Jacqueline Howett example, which spawned the Guardian article which in turn spawned this play, is a cautionary tale about how reacting badly to a bad review has scuttled an aspiring writer’s chances of ever being picked up by an established publisher. Linking to the blogged review and comments also offers amusement at her inability to see how clearly bad her grammar, punctuation and sentence structures are (even though Howett has now removed her posts).

The problem with Nucking Futs – ably mounted in a clever cardboard cut-out set of his own design by director Ed Watson – is that nothing of consequence is truly at stake because Cleo has no public standing, her actual writing is not put up for scrutiny, and rather than disgrace herself on the internet she has merely disrupted a small town writer’s and reader’s session, leaving her family and a few others to deal with the rather sad outcome. Her internet presence, as such, is inconsequential.

There is a suggestion at the end that Cleo has capitalised on her fame nevertheless with a book that exploits the exploiters, which could be a good punchline if only it had the requisite set-up. If just one clip of something she said or did were to hit YouTube and credibly go viral within the first third of the script, the intended play may get some traction.

As it stands, the inaptly-named Nucking Futs offers a platform for some entertaining performances but loses its way in attempting to explore its stated theme. 

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