Overview
"It's just kind of odd that we live in a culture that tells us we need to be better all the time," says playwright Declan Greene. "We're living in that weird suburbia that was always satirised in the nineties as Betty Crocker and white picket fences except now we want holidays in Morocco, anal sex on tap and spray tans."
As its spicy name would imply, Greene's Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography takes place in a world of squeamish vulnerability. Past the barrage of cat videos and poker tournaments, Greene tackles the world of online dating, exploring the potential to craft a fictional identity in a daunting virtual marketplace.
It is this sticky junction between self-improvement and a human tendency to confabulate that is the premise of Greene's newest project. "We're always reaching for an illusion just beyond our fingertips," he says. "I'm interested in exploring that shame and guilt of not having access to that."
Greene is largely known as the co-founder of Sisters Grimm (Summertime in the Garden of Eden, Little Mercy), a queer theatre company producing melodramatic genre mash-ups, brimming with tacky extravagance and hilarious antics. Whilst still delving into comedies and scrutinising the limits of theatre, his solo practice is perhaps more "sombre in tone."
Brought to life by director Lee Lewis, Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography revolves around a disillusioned middle-aged couple (Andrea Gibbs and Steve Rodgers) who forge their relationship online. In navigating through the pitfalls of cyberspace and the unhappy truths of their realities, Greene aims to balance bleak humour with vulnerability, commenting "these are two people who have been very deeply conditioned to believe that they have to be much better than what they are."
With this play, Greene is also interested in exploring our changing relationship with language and its different domains. "If you examine what a play is on a mechanical basis, it's live text, [which is] relevant to our lives in a way that it's never been before. For example, if you scroll back through your iPhone, you'll see a history of every bit of communication you've had with a person. You have literally a script for your relationship that goes back years." In capturing these raw threads that make up the meat of relationships, Greene is tapping into the potential of digital vernacular and reshaping it to fit into a theatrical context.
Dispensing with social etiquette, this bold and intimate production aims to excavate the messiness, discomfort and humiliation of relationships as they unfold online and offline. According to Greene, this notion of uncompromising reality has been a guiding principle throughout rehearsals.
"One thing Lee said a little while ago that's really stuck with me is that so often theatre is about escapism and that's what people are looking for," he says. "But for her, what's unique about this show is that we're trying to do the opposite. Instead of giving them an out, we're trying to make people focus back in on their lives."
Eight Gigabytes of Hardcore Pornography plays at the Griffin Theatre Company's SBW Stables from May 2 to June 14. To book tickets, head to the Griffin website.
