Darknet, Southwark Playhouse review ★★★★★

‘If you aren’t paying, you’re the product.’ This is the mantra of the off-grid buzzkill, the reminder that almost all the information we share online is sold on to companies who can somehow make money from knowing our, thoughts, feelings and favourite cat pictures. So what if we sold that data directly? This is the premise of Darknet, a dystopian tale of desperate teenagers, lonely executives, drug addicts and cam girls, all trying to hack to freedom in a world where sharing online has become a major source of income.

Half a dozen actors multiply into an enormous cast of characters, and roles are doubled with considerable care and insight. This gives rise to some wonderfully eclectic performances from the supporting cast, with Robin Berry, Naveed Khan and Greer Dale-Foulkes providing almost all of the play’s funniest and most deeply moving moments from the sidelines. This occasionally leaves the bigger parts feeling a little leaden by comparison, but the three leads acquit themselves well, except for some decidedly dodgy accent work - one visibly mortified actor spent whole scenes sliding between San Francisco and Belfast, often in the space of a single mangled syllable.

Darknet inevitably finds itself in the shadow of The Nether, Jennifer Haley’s unsettling study of fantasy and child abuse in the deep web which transferred to the West End last year. Where that play cut relentlessly to the heart of our fears about the freedom we’re afforded online, this production is more varied; dystopian satire joshes for space with family comedy, boy-meets-girl romance and gritty(ish) hard-luck stories, equal parts H.G Wells and Jacqueline Wilson.

Lewenstein writes well in all these genres, and the result is a clever, entertaining merry-go-round, albeit one that grinds to a halt when she reaches for deeper meaning. ‘See the bigger picture’, ‘it’s good to talk’, ‘only the guilty need fear’ – these are just a few of the parade of clichés trotted out when a point needs hammering home. But, though it falls just short of real profundity, this is an imaginative, well-crafted work about the perils of sharing online which stays with you, even as you tweet how much you enjoyed it.