About Time You Saw: Four Minutes Twelve SecondsBy Charlotte Collins

Photography by Ikin Yum

The phrase “I don’t get it, this impulse to share everything” is a familiar one for Millennials. Constant newsfeed refreshing, tweeting and hashtagging is a symptom of generation X, and despite our elders’ warning of the consequences of projecting our lives into the world, we continue to feed our addiction, smart phones persistently glued to our hands, eyes and ears. Performed on the Trafalgar Studios’ intimate stage 2, Olivier-nominated Four Minutes Twelve Seconds is the all too close to home portrayal of what happens when the adults are proved right, and this reliance on and obsession with social media and technology goes awry.

Photography by Ikin Yum

Di and Dave are distraught when an explicit video of 17 year old son Jack and his now ex girlfriend Cara is leaked, racking up 500000 views and provoking Cara’s thuggish family to seek revenge on Jack. We follow Di’s quest to find out who released the footage, and her painful journey of discovery in which it emerges that her prodigal son could in fact be guilty of the violent act that he appears to be committing in the clip. Playwright James Fritz presents a wealth of 21st century social concerns; from the permanence of our shared online content to the desperation of class aspiration, to the ever-controversial question of when is rape rape, this is a reflective and thought-provoking piece, heightened by the space and stages’ claustrophobic design. The floor and ceiling of the set are covered in tiny coloured squares; it doesn’t take a developer to notice the resemblance to pixels. At moments of contention, a dialling tone crackles and a bright light zooms across the ceiling, the impact of the virtual world visual represented on stage.

Photography by Ikin Yum

Humerous, intense and uncomfortably realistic, this reflection on the transformative and potential life-changing impacts of technology will truly make you consider your own ‘impulse to share everything.’