A harrowing vision of a dark future

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

– Arthur C. Clarke

While the advent of the Internet Age has brought with it a multitude of wondrous things (the information overload that is Wikipedia; an ability to connect with people around the globe in a matter of seconds; an unending supply of cat videos), it has also done something much more sinister, allowing people to explore their deepest, darkest desires. It is this duality that playwright Jennifer Haley explores in her ground-breaking play The Nether, which, following a sell-out run at the Royal Court last year, has returned to London’s Duke of York Theatre. Set in 2050, a year that manages to be simultaneously distant and imminent, the premise of the play is that the internet has evolved into ‘The Nether’, a vast network of individuals interacting in an artificially generated cyberspace; over time, more and more aspects of life have passed over into The Nether: schooling, industry, and even humans, allowed to permanently reside in this alternative universe thanks to the use of complex life-support machines in the ‘real world’.

Sadly, The Nether has also allowed the base instincts of humanity to flourish, and we follow law-enforcement agent Morris (Amanda Hale), as she tracks down the mysterious ‘Poppa’, aka Sims (Stanley Townsend), a programmer who has created an electronic idyll called ‘The Hideaway’. In this grotesque vision of Victoriana, Poppa’s clients can anonymously come and go, stopping by to do unspeakable things to the little girls who reside in the house. Of course, none of the children involved are real (although the creepily charming Iris was played on this occasion by gifted child actor Zoe Borough, in a superb London debut), they are simply pixels, complex renderings of crinoline, silk, and flesh; but Hayley asks whether this really matters, and whether indulging in such fantasies, even within the confines of the imagination, is beyond the pale of the law.

Amanda Hale is excellent in the role of Morris, turning what could be a mere collection of tropes (icy and brittle high-flyer; dressed all in black and sporting a facelift-giving bun; emotionally distant with daddy issues) into a three-dimensional character, thanks to a nuanced performance that perfectly highlights the play’s subtleties. But particular credit must go to David Calder’s perverted Doyle and Stanley Townsend’s blood-chilling Sims: it is one thing to play a predator on stage, quite another to make them seem simultaneously sympathetic and sickening. The cast work well together, creating a multi-layered character study in the middle of a vortex of moral turpitude.

Jeremy Herrin, fresh from producing Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, directs this simmering production with a steady hand, helped immensely by the talents of set designer Es Devlin, whose technical trickery helps pull off the juggling act of simultaneously showing two locations. From the harshly strip-lit interrogation office, intimidating in its blankness, we are thrown into the Arcadia of The Hideaway, a beautiful gothic house, whose lush surroundings blur and bend in a series of mirrors like a mirage, emphasising the ephemeral nature of the online world.

_The Nether _is one of those special plays that occupies a space in your mind long after the curtain has gone down. The destructive power of cyberspace has always appealed to speculative fiction authors, from William Gibson, the originator of the term, to Margaret Atwood, whose Oryx and Crake sees people surfing the web for live videos of suicides and torture; however, as our technology has progressed, the question of what limits we can place on the internet’s collective imagination has shifted from speculation to reality. Haley has created this play at a critical time, raising questions about the regulation of technology, the freedom internet anonymity can bring, and even the very nature of human relationships. There is a duality between human and avatar in The Nether, meaning that everything we are presented with is slightly askew; you can’t trust everything you see, least of all on the Internet.

Unlike other recent examples of speculative fiction - such as Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, which writer Mallory Ortberg succinctly describes as “what if phones, but too much” - The Nether doesn’t act as some kind of high-brow thought experiment designed to highlight the perils of Tinder, or Facebook; it is much more pertinent than that, exploring an issue that is already becoming a problem. As Haley herself says, “it’s happening”, citing the much-feted Oculus Rift technology, and the fact that in online roleplaying game Second Life areas for child and adult avatars have to be separated. In those respects The Nether acts as both an ominous prediction of the future, and a timely warning for the present.

The Nether runs at the Duke of York’s Theatre until 25th April. Tickets from £10