Public Domain at Southwark Playhouse review: ambitious but fatally ambivalent

The level of ambition in this two-handed musical about the pros and cons of social media is so high it inevitably falls short. Public Domain is a bold, up-to-the-minute, technically sophisticated attempt to create a hybrid lockdown art form, blending streamed live performance from the Southwark Playhouse stage with video footage (a recording of one of the live performances will stream this week). Unfortunately the electronic music is unremarkable and the narrative, mostly centred around a millennial influencer and an angsty Gen Z vlogger, woefully unfocused. The show’s message – hey guys, the internet can be, like, really bad, but also, like, really great – is banal.

The two creator/performers, writer Francesca Forristal and composer Jordan Paul Clarke, made a rod for their own backs when they decided to construct a verbatim show from online material. Everything in the script and lyrics is culled from Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, or Senate hearings and TV interviews with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

The obvious model for this is Alecky Blythe’s 2011 musical London Road about the Ipswich serial murders. But that show had a tight narrative and geographical focus, and worked fragments of verbatim dialogue into a layered score. Here, lines about Facebook employees’ perks – “free food, ping-pong tables, great employee benefits” – are hammered into conventional songs that mostly sound like they could be jingles or ringtones. And the subject matter is just too big for a 65-minute show’s scope.

It kicks off with a utopian vision of friends, then “friends of our friends”, connecting through Facebook in a loving, supportive community. “Just like that we felt a little less alone,” sing Forristal and Clarke, not entirely in harmony. But, oh no: “Then something happened: FAKE NEWS!”

We’ve barely taken in this bombshell before we are introduced to Forristal’s Millie, a law student turned health coach, and Z (Clarke), a teenage YouTuber who vlogs about how to be popular in school, even though he isn’t. All Millie seems to do is repeatedly assure her followers “you are my friends” and assert her “authenticity”. And Z just freaks out repeatedly for the camera, and whines about being blocked from TikTok for some unknown guideline violation.

Threaded through these vapid interludes are the Zuckerberg/Chan sequences, acted out by Forristal and Clarke. Zuckerberg’s slippery answers to Senators are juxtaposed with the horrors that Facebook’s moderators have to witness. It’s a particular low point in the show when accounts of animal abuse videos are set to a plinkety-plonk comic tune.

But the creators don’t paint Zuckerberg entirely as a villain, and repeatedly balance the sins of social media (addictiveness, cyber-bullying, data exploitation, misinformation) with its potential for good. Rather than an attempt to be even-handed, this feels like ambivalence, a fatal uncertainty over what this show is actually saying.

Before the final video montage, which includes the storming of the Capitol in Washington, we get a song about senior citizens who have embraced the online world. This is by far the most musically pleasing tune of the evening, but it also feels like a pat happy ending slapped on the chaotic and vaguely doomy meanderings that have gone before.

Streaming January 19-24, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk