adelaide fringe theatre review: status update, a guide to early 21st c life

Over the course of my creative arts degree, I had to do a couple of subjects in screenwriting. I liked them, but given that my interests are in poetry and nonfiction, these subjects never seemed quite as useful to me as did others. Until I saw Status Update.

Thanks to said subjects, I was able to identify what Status Update lacked, rather than just feeling a sense of general unease that something was missing. The most notable absences were: a premise, a conflict, a turning point, and well-developed characters. This play was in fact incredibly useful in my own education, insofar as it helped me understand why these things are so important to a storyline.

Status Update is supposedly a representation of life today for people in their 20s, its byline being ‘A Guide to Early 21st C Life’. If you were to take the play as gospel, it would appear that those of us in our early-mid 20s feel empty, quit jobs on a whim, and spend all our time thinking about our own funerals and/or navel-gazing. The problem may well be that it wasn’t written by someone in their early-mid 20s, and so it seems like a shallow observation rather than any sort of exploration (the ‘what’ instead of the ‘why’, if you will). In glen r johns’ effort to cover aspects of modern life “inc. but not limited to globalisation, Occupy, social networking, compassion fatigue, Angry Birds & the lost art of writing letters by hand”, the play says so much without saying anything at all (kind of like the latter part of that sentence).

But all of this could arguably be forgiven if the characters had at least been likeable, or even relateable. Perhaps they’re supposed to be reflective of what disgruntled idiots we Gen-Yers really are, but I believe that this play was supposed to speak to an audience around the age of its characters, rather than an older crowd ready and raring to mock. The main problem though is that I don’t know anyone like these people, and the characters and their actions are thus incomprehensible. There was no chemistry between them (they may well all be perfectly adequate actors on their own, but it’s hard to say), no motives for their actions, and when the protagonist, Kylie, played by Sarah Cullinan, has a revelation after staying home for days and watching all of Breaking Bad, the issue isn’t even that it’s come out of nowhere or that the only problem she seemed to have prior was chronic dissatisfaction, but rather that I simply did not care in the slightest. Nothing any of the characters did or said moved me in any way, though maybe that’s just my early-mid 20s desire to derive meaning from anything and everything.

Status Update attempts to be a commentary on life for us young folk in a world that’s increasingly interconnected and yet made detached by the Internet. But don’t we all know this? We all know that Facebook is banal and ultimately irrelevant and that we spend too much time on our phones, but aren’t these the same criticisms that were made of the television (aka the “idiot box”) just a few years ago? This is nothing new, and finding ways to waste time is hardly exclusive to Gen Y.

Potbelly Productions purports to ask questions others aren’t asking, but they may do better to consider those that they can answer, or that at least present more interesting dilemmas than the place of Angry Birds in modern life.