I Watched Someone Die on Tiktok, Canberra Theatre Centre New Works, Courtyard Studio, 19-21 Sept

 

Charlotte Otton's solo show is a one hour dive into the extremes of social media - how a young woman growing up in a social media age has been affected by exposure to extreme images of life, death, trauma and sexuality. For someone around 15 years older than her, it's a reflection of all our worst fears of the web (and I say that as someone currently typing this review onto the web, who's aware that I wouldn't be doing this on a regular basis if the web didn't exist, and I've been pretty directly told by traditional media owners that I wouldn't be hired by them because I don't hold a relevant degree, just ... you know, several decades of being an audeince, reading theatrical literature, and writing this stuff... no, I'm not bitter at all, how dare you suggest that). 

Back to Otton's show for a second - she sells her material with precision, singing, embodying, narrating and trauma-dumping like a demon. It's a tight show, circling its point and provoking all kinds of thoughts while the multimedia screens play a curated set of material from social media that merely hint at the level of 

There is a wider debate about whether social media is just the same sins that always existed with the barriers removed - the salaciousness of reporting on Jack the Ripper in the 19th century, for example, is from the same source as a modern true-crime reporting on any violent act today - but it's certainly true that the guardrails of editing and control are off. And reckoning with the implications of that is a big topic that Otton explores with precision and skill.