Control

We all have a reality TV guilty pleasure. No one is immune to the contrived drama, manufactured confrontation and social media saturation. We are programmed to digest the spate of reality TV shows and puff up D-, E- all the way to Z-grade celebrities. Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes? In comes Control. Written by Keziah Warner, Control is the interplanetary show that explores humanity’s desire to dictate how we are perceived by others.

Onstage at Red Stitch Theatre till Sunday, 3 November, the story is told in three semi-discrete acts, in three different time periods. The opening act takes place on a spaceship hurtling towards Mars. On board are four television ‘personalities’: a heavily pregnant ex-ballerina; a child detective; a bitter puppeteer; and a feminist pop princess. The group are subject to a series of challenges – to be a hero, to seduce another contestant, to fight – all for the benefits of the viewers. The spacecraft begins to malfunction and with imminent disaster ahead, we question if anyone was watching them at all?

Let’s jump ahead thirty years and meet the same cast in a completely different setting. In a post-riot, artificial-intelligence-strong era in Melbourne, purchasing and storing data for childhood memories is a high commodity. Nicki (Naomi Rukavina) and Caroline (Christina O’Neill) work at a memory data warehouse: we keep your memories safe, so you don’t have to. Their new colleague, Alex (Dushan Philips), an A.I., with a hilarious knack for dance, intimidates them due to his superior processing capabilities. Although Nicki attests to strictly following protocol, when Xavier (the younger half-brother of the child detective, Jack [Samuel Rowe], on the spaceship) requests to erase the memory of his brother because his death is too painful, the line between what she will and won’t do begins to blur.

In the next time jump, eighty years or so, Isabelle (Caroline’s daughter) and Esta the bot are on a facility on New Earth Mars. Isabelle is programming Esta to become a primary school teacher, and tweaks her personality traits like dials on a keyboard: increase happiness by 4, decrease compassion by 2, increase desire by 8. Isabelle and Esta begin to fall in love, but Isabelle is unwilling to give in to it. Despite being the slowest of the three acts in terms of pace, this story packed a lot of heart, and unpicked at the competing desires of wanting love and the inability to fully accept it.

A mix between Unreal, Westworld and Her, Control held my interest from the very beginning to the very end. The cast were tremendous – the amount of dialogue they had to learn was astonishing – and had the right amount of chemistry, you could really tell they were all immersed in the story. Naomi Rukavina was awe-inspiring. She played each character – the pop princess with a rough upbringing, Nicki and Esta – with such vivaciousness and energy. The set, while minimal, allowed the actors to own and fill the space. The costumes design by Emily Collet were beautiful.