STAGE PUBLIC DOMAIN

southwarkplayhouse.co.uk until January 31

This lockdown musical skewers the selfperpetuating vacuum of social media, where everybody shares too much yet too often means too little. It could easily appear to be a lazy parody except every line in the show is taken verbatim from real public posts, backed by 1,000 dizzying sound, film and image cues.

It’s conceived and written by Francesca Forristal and Jordan Paul Clarke who play every role, starting with the central duo of neurotic teenage “Youtube influencer” Z and Millie, “a health coach” inspired to “speak my truth”. The dynamic pair also play Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg and his wife Priscilla Chan, preaching about their “moral responsibility to society” while their moderators are driven to despair monitoring posts from the ugliest parts of humanity.

Ultimately, though, the show also finds the human heart that beats online and creates communities and connections, movingly voiced by posts from a retirement home. It’s complex and profound but also as shallow as its subject matter – and how can we judge when we’re complicit?

be Persian, not Jewish. So, instead of being gunned down with his fellow Jewish prisoners, Gilles is sent to a transit camp in France where he must teach Farsi to the commandant (Lars Eidinger).

Not only does he have to invent Persian-sounding gibberish but he also has to memorise every made-up word without the aid of pen or paper.

Linguists will point out that there is a lot more to a language than memorising words (what about grammar and structure?) but the film is so unbearably tense, I couldn’t question it.

Eidinger makes an intriguing Nazi while Biscayart lets us see the consequence of every made-up word weighing on this the poor man’s soul.