In the tweet of the moment

Beyond being an interminable stream of the thoughts of Lethal Bizzle, Twitter for this reviewer had always been just another tool for procrastination. In 2006, many of the angel investors running their rule over the nascent microblogging site figured the same. To have said to them then that tweets of 140 characters would one day be enough to catalyse the downfall of governments, they would have dismissed you as mad. How wrong they all were.

Pirates of Carthage follows the month or so centred around Christmas 2010 that saw the demise of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia. It takes a unique approach to the story telling – we see the events unfold through the tweets of a select few commentators, both in Tunisia and abroad, deftly woven with pertinent footage from across the web and extracts from classical literature. Using multiple projectors and a cast of four to recite the tweets, Pirates of Carthage fittingly bombards the audience with information, ‘fusing’ as its writer, Dan Kelly, explains, ‘spoken word, video montage and Tunisian Hip-Hop’.

The result is a highly informative, if impassive, piece of theatre that explores the increasingly significant impact of virtual social media on the real world. Drawing references from pop culture as well as nineteenth century literature, Kelly encourages his audience to look beyond their normally mundane use of the Internet and see its role in writing the history of our age: as on one screen a cursor idly clicks its way through iPlayer, on another, the Jasmin Revolution gains momentum on Twitter.

At times the format is quite repetitive – knowing how the story ends certainly had it benefits as the last few minutes began to grind – but no criticisms can be made of its ingenuity. I commend the production’s efforts to let facts drive the narrative but I was struck by how sparingly the cast was used – they were more storytellers than actors – and I found myself at times hungry for a little more humanity and, dare I say it, emotion in the characters behind the tweets.

As contemporary theatre goes, Pirates of Carthage couldn’t have embraced social media much better. I can’t say I’ve seen anything else that effectively tells its narrative from the perspective of the Internet, and I very much doubt this will be the last. And at least until then, as I despair over yet another tweet about how amazing Sherlock is, I can know that somewhere else on the Twittersphere someone is using their 140 characters for a nobler cause. Ahem, Life Sciences.

Pirates of Carthage is showing at The Nellie Dean 23-24 January, tickets £5.