You Are Not With Me at the Arches
Some background on Andrew and Laura’s show at the 2009 Arches Live festival. WARNING: CONTAINS MINOR PLOT SPOILERS
The internet, we are constantly reminded, is full of unreliable information and stranger danger. How do you know that anything you read on here is the truth, or that the people you’re talking to are who they say? Chatrooms are hiding places for paedophiles grooming children. Every attractive blonde woman online is actually a sweaty, bald, fortysomething man indulging some peculiar sexual fantasy. Don’t put too many personal details on Facebook, because someone might use them to steal all your money.
But the possibility that nothing is true and no-one is who they say they are is also one of the most liberating things about the internet. If no-one can be trusted, you too are freed of any obligation to tell the truth. You can be whoever or whatever you want to be. And “the truth” is elusive anyway. People constantly reveal themselves in small, unwitting ways, none of which need involve anything as mundane as a fact.
By this logic, the less you know about who you’re talking to online, the more interesting the encounter could be. So I’m not remotely surprised by the success of www.omegle.com, a chatroom that began life earlier this year and now has a worldwide following. At any one time, there are between 2,000 and 4,000 users online.
Unlike most chatrooms, designed to introduce kindred spirits, Omegle hooks you up with strangers at random. Conversationally you fly completely blind. “You are now talking to a random stranger, say hi!” it breezily tells you on your arrival, as it plunges you straight into a social encounter.
I tried Omegle for the first time back in April. The first conversation I had is still burned into my memory. “Take your clothes off you fucking bitch!” wrote my random stranger, out of the blue, before I’d even had time to type ‘hello’. I was so taken aback I didn’t respond straight away, and the request was impatiently repeated. “Take them off!” Flustered, I typed back: “I don’t think I like you, random stranger. You’re very forward.” At which point the random stranger told me to “fuck off” and abruptly terminated the connection.
My second chat was equally brief. “Dawg,” went my stranger’s opening gambit. “Cat,” I replied, unsure how to proceed. “What are you talking about?” random stranger replied. “You said dawg, so I thought it’d be funny to say cat!” I explained. “You were fucking wrong,” replied random stranger. Seconds later, they cut me off too.
Obviously this was enormous fun. Omegle, at its best, is a hotbed of confusion, misunderstanding and sheer rudeness - all from the comfort and safety of your home computer! The confusion is heightened by the time it takes for a message to travel from you to your conversational partner, meaning that you are constantly talking at cross purposes.
Not everyone on Omegle is rude or peculiar. I also had an interesting chat with a woman from the American midwest who ran her own detective agency (perks: “being anonymous, observing people undetected”). I could see why Omegle appealed to her. Then again, the detective agency thing could have been a lie (as could “midwest USA” and “woman”). But that’s part of the fun. Omegle is a game, a performance.
Part of the reason I was on Omegle was so that I could write about it for a magazine article. It was an arts magazine, so as a slightly spurious justification for writing about Omegle (really I just wanted to go try out this funny new website on work time) I wrote about how, looking over my various chat transcripts, they made me think of all the sitcoms and films whose comedy and insight spring from confusion and misunderstanding. How, sometimes, I felt like I was in a Coen Brothers movie. ‘Expect a verbatim theatre show based on Omegle any time,’ I concluded.
Five months later, something resembling that very show is about to open at the Arches Live festival in Glasgow. In the end, I had to write it myself (or rather co-write it with Laura, who was as amused by Omegle as I was). It’s called You Are Not With Me, and it is a 20-minute show for an audience of two people at a time (preferably strangers), who - spoiler alert - effectively act as avatars for the characters in the story. It’s all about the way that people use the internet to perform versions of themselves to the world, and the way people can be damaged by that. This is, we appreciate, already well-trodden territory, but we hope to offer a fresh take on it. We’ve tried to make it funny and poignant.
Arches Live has loads of shows this year - 30 in all - which as well as being quite exciting is something of a relief. This is the first time I have attempted to write a theatre script, and it’s been a little daunting. Only last week we scrapped the entire thing and started again from scratch. With so much else on, though, it feels like there’s slightly less pressure.
Anyway, it’s an experiment. It might work, or it might not. We’ll find out on opening night, I guess. If you’d like to go, the show runs at the Arches from Thursday 17 September to Saturday 19 September. There are eight performances each night, running at half hour intervals from 6.30pm to 10pm. Given that there are only two people in the audience for each performance, there is obviously a very limited number of tickets, so it would be a good idea to book in advance. Tickets for You Are Not With Me cost £6 (or £4 concession), so you might be better off getting a day ticket (£13/£9) or a festival pass, which at £28 for 30 shows is a pretty good deal.
Andrew
