Self Tape
Kings Head Theatre • 18th June - 2nd July
Having missed out on seeing Self Tape when its was performed as part of the Queer Interrogation season at London’s Kings Head Theatre in April, I was glad to find it had returned to the same venue for a limited season where it is currently playing until 2nd July.
Written and performed by Michael Batten and directed by Scott Le Crass, this one man play focuses on the changing fortunes of down-on-his luck actor Jonas Harland, ‘fortunes’ being the one thing Jonas just doesn’t have as, despite the number of self-tape requests his agent is sending Jonas’s way, mostly for parts in some less than creatively challenging commercials, he just isn’t getting the work. With a mortgage that still needs paying however, Jonas looks to find another way to earn some money, and he soon finds himself swapping the camera on his iPhone for the webcam on his laptop, as he decides to dip a toe into the world of webcam ‘modelling’. What follows is a bold and frank depiction of the desperate decisions people will take in order to survive, as whilst Batten’s play doesn’t exactly condemn Jonas for the decisions he has to make, the picture that ultimately gets painted is a fairly bleak one, Jonas quickly beginning to feel even more worthless and morally bankrupt than he did when he was auditioning for commercials to sell burgers.
As he slips deeper and deeper into a world where the only asset he has left to sell is his body, he finds himself becoming increasingly trapped in a world of cyber-sex, where his newly found financial success comes as the result of being, and doing, anything his ‘customers’ demand of him, and whilst grateful for the income that one regular client provides, this fantasy service begins to spiral out of control, taking a dark turn that means his one lucky break might just be about to come crashing down around him.
The staging of Self Tape is a minimal, but effective affair. A table, a chair, a stand for his iPhone, and a smaller side-table on which sits a photograph of his deceased mother, which he makes sure to turn face-down prior to his laptop getting turned on. The rest is done with some successfully atmospheric lighting (Joseph Bryant) which is bright and airy during the scenes where Jonas attempts to record his audition tapes, but plunges into an ominous darkness with just the cold, stark light of the laptop screen to illuminate his body when web-cammimg… and illuminate his body it does.
Whilst it will come as no surprise to anyone that nudity and cam sex-shows go hand-in-hand, the graphic on stage depiction of the acts Jonas gets asked to perform leaves so little to the imagination that I was a bit surprised not to see a ‘content warning’ on the door as I entered the theatre as, when the stage becomes a dark and dimly lit room, the audience becomes just as much a voyeur as the client, albeit with the added discomfort of the increasingly demanding requests presumably not being to the same ‘taste’ of any private fantasy’s the audience themselves might be harbouring, and whilst Jonas’s clients are unable to see the increasing distress he is in, (or possibly just choose not to), it is definitely made clear for the audience, and can make the prolonged role play scenes a fairly brutal watch at times, no doubt with the potential to trigger anyone that may have actually found themselves following a similar path. (You’d be surprised!) The whole experience leaves Jonas both emotionally broken and increasingly isolated, a far cry from the soft voiced, happy-go-lucky charming persona Jonas starts the play with, during which he occasionally breaks the fourth wall to make the occasional comically sardonic aside, of which I would definitely have welcomed more of, as it is in these moments that Batten really manages to endear his character to the audience, making our reaction to his slow decline all the more visceral.
The thoughtful and measured way in which Batten and Le Crass chart this changing emotional state throughout the the play is as impressive as it is increasingly uncomfortable to watch, the slow ramping up of Jonas’s self-loathing and the situation in which he finds himself increasingly trapped in being skilfully paced. A lot of this is done through the sheer physicality of Batten’s performance as we see the mask that hides his own disgust slowly start to crack as he endures, along with the audience, the long, increasingly perverse fantasy’s of his regular client. With a projector on hand to flash up the occasional text based messages from other clients not brave enough to reveal their own identities, it seemed a missed opportunity not to also project a live feed from Jonas’s webcam, to further intensify the visible yet subtle shifts in his reaction during these occasionally prolonged exchanges.
Whilst there remained a couple of threads to the story that never get as fully examined or explained as they could have been, which leaves the audience filling in a few of the gaps for themselves, the play nonetheless succeeds as an exploration of this modern phenomena that grew exponentially during lockdown and the changed world we found ourselves in afterwards. Self Tape certainly succeeds in raising plenty of red flags during this sobering examination of the cam-sex industry, and with a confident and challenging performance at it’s core, and assured direction from Le Crass, the play provides plenty of moments you’ll be dissecting long after the plays finalé, but be warned, for some this will be an explicit, bold, challenging and potentially triggering piece of theatre.
★★★★
review: Simon J. Webb
photographs: Bonnie Britain