666 Comments at the Spring Arts Centre, Havant REVIEW: 'Intelligent and entertaining theatre'

In 2010, the American cartoonist, Gabby Schulz posted a comic strip on HIS website which neatly characterised a certain male attitude towards a comic strip posted on HER website by his fictitious female cartoonist.

Over the next three days, the strip provoked an avalanche of comments.

Devised by Aliki Chapple, the show dramatises the range of these exchanges. That they veered from well-argued points of view from both men and women to bigoted trolling is perhaps only to be expected.

The sheer volume of them was the phenomenon.

Chapple performs the piece with Ben Rigby. They skilfully find voices and body language to flesh out more than 50 different contributors to the ‘conversation’.

Projection gives us the online pseudonym of each contributor on a set which makes ironic use of baby blue and pink. The actors both take male and female roles and move effortlessly from individuals offering coherent debate to those raging with foul-mouthed insult.

Rigby is particularly versatile in this. Ringing out most eloquently is the sane and witty voice of Schulz himself.

If I have any issue with what is effectively a piece of verbatim theatre, drawing on a chronological sequence of posts, it is that the raw material, by its nature, has no dramatic structure of its own. Riffs of cogent debate or offensive rant build up and die down in succession with all the repetition of positions that internet debate is subject to.

For all that, this is a piece of intelligent and entertaining theatre which succeeds in forging from the chaos of its subject matter a clear point of view of its own.