Bloggers – Real Internet Diaries

Writer/director Oliver Mann has constructed this show entirely from edited extracts of internet blogs, and Connected Theatre crack through the snippets of the lives of eleven bloggers at a fair pace and with considerable flair and versatility. I particularly liked Karen Cooper’s sex mad, life-loving woman and Matthew Conway’s streetwise Ali G-esque youngster. The problem with the show is basically the same as the problem with blogging in general: what is it about these people’s lives that makes them worthy of sharing with either a cyber or theatre audience?

Take Lizzie Conrad’s sad agoraphobic. The extraordinary thing about her is that she is a middle-aged woman who works for a sex chat line. It’s not actually more interesting because she chooses to write about it online. Jonathan Roberts’ skilfully takes us through every tortured twist and turn of his on/off relationship with the love of his life, but by the end I was thinking “God, we’ve all been there, mate, get over it!” There’s something essentially self-indulgent about blogging, and translating some of these tales to the stage merely emphasises that. Is there any point in presenting here the story of a young man who has huge issues with his father when Shakespeare kind of cracked that one.

Some characters work better than others and I think that is because the actors perform them particularly well rather than the original bloggers were better writers. I’d have liked to see more of the scenes when the personalities were juxtaposed and overlapped as well as a bit more insight into why people feel the need to blog. In the end the basic fault in this piece is summed up by an anecdote about a broken car light. The blogger thinks it’s a great story, but it isn’t, and the talented performer struggles to whip it up to a punch line but there isn’t one. You don’t need shape and structure if you’re writing a blog, but you do in the theatre.

That said if blogging is your thing then the tremendous versatility and energy of this talented troop will be worth the trip to The Underbelly. Don’t forget to write it up later.