The internet is where innocence goes to die and you can come too is not a traditional theatre show and does not claim to be. Its creators, zin partnership, call it “an existential comic happening”; I would call it a performance art piece that coexists in the live and digital space at once. I would also call it a hell of a lot of fun. 

Two women, Harriet Gillies and Roslyn Helper, sit at their computers with their screens projected onto the wall behind them. At first, the two of them perform a synchronised sequence of actions – one opens up an eight hour video of a crackling fireplace on YouTube, while the other turns on a stream of smooth jazz. Then, Roslyn updates her Facebook status: “IF YOU WANT TO CHAT WITH ME AND Harriet LIKE THIS STATUS AND WE’LL ADD YOU IN!” As the audience begin to bombard the performers with gifs, memes and all-caps song requests by the dozen, the show becomes both an anarchic bricolage of weird internet ephemera and a regular Sunday night in my house.

The fact it is both those things at once is kind of the point. Gillies and Helper re-frame the familiar act of internet surfing as a performative activity, with an inherent narrative – one idea leads to another, which leads to another, and before you know it you’ve ended up somewhere quite far from the place you began. By changing the context of this generally private activity and placing it in a public performance space, zin partnership invite us to view internet surfing as a creative act. 

Internet surfing is also usually a solitary activity, while here it is a decidedly communal one. Throughout the single hour of the show, freed from the social anxiety of face-to-face contact (despite everyone being in the same room, actors and audience communicate almost exclusively through Facebook chat), the energy in the room becomes one of a small, tight-knit community, with all the hyper-specificity that entails; before the end of the show we have created our own in-jokes.

The show is divided into four ‘acts’, each of which represents another layer deeper in our journey down the “internet spiral into hell” and provides necessary structure for the experience. Pizza is ordered early in the show, and periodic check-ins with the delivery tracker create a building sense of dramatic tension, culminating in spontaneous applause once the pizza arrives, and an unwitting star turn from whichever poor Dominos driver has to come up to the auditorium to deliver it. 

It should be clear from this review that The internet is where…. is not for everyone; it assumes that its audience will have a level of familiarity with internet surfing, as without that knowledge the entire show would just be confusing. The amount of hardcore pornography in the second half of the show will also no doubt turn some stomachs – some of our audience voice their disapproval loudly in the group chat, though this only adds to the show’s humour. 

However, for audiences who recognise the activities up on stage as the same ones they perform every night at home – who perhaps have been disappointed by attempts to faithfully reproduce the experience of internet usage in more traditional theatre work – The internet is where… is a chaotic, subversive and hilarious look at ourselves and this strange modern world we live in.

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