It seems somehow fitting that Friday night's cutting-edge opener for the Settle Stories 2018 festival at the town's Victoria Hall should combine storytelling at its most luminous with the bitter taste of what our digital future may hold.

Comprehensively researched and slickly executed, Proto-type Theater's persuasive and deeply affecting multi-media two-hander, was much bigger than the sum of its individual components. Political theatre at its most arresting, Gillian Lees and Rachel Baynton exposed the fears of everywoman respecting the invasive proliferation of surveillance systems, and the ease with which private, hegemonic corporations and government bodies channel information garnered through internet, social media and commercial use.

Not that voluminous collations of information are intrinsically dangerous. They become so when harnessed to make deterministic judgments respecting individual behaviour, and potentially to direct that behaviour towards unspecified, prescribed goals.

The cleverly lingering filmic shot of several titanic information repositories in the deserts of Utah, revealing faceless concrete on the outside, and nothing of the interior, became a metaphor for secrecy, for the alarming prospect of, to paraphrase Thomas Hardy, an all-seeing multiplying eye, bloated on information, compelled to intrusion, leaving nothing to chance.

The precisely measured ambiguity of Proto-type's performance underwrites a close attention to collective social nuance: an acceptance of helplessness against hidden apparatuses masquerading as benign, and the disbelief of most of us when presented with what seem, on the surface, to be the commonplaces of human existence - media for the facilitation of communication, for entertainment and for the buying of product.



But, in a cleverly modulated dialogue between the two actors, the performance illuminates the dark underside of eavesdropping, the wholesale hijacking of private information, and the emendation of small print to legitimise strategies of control. Manipulated to look like a social defence mechanism, the drama's repeated mantra - 'TO KEEP YOU SAFE' - disguises an altogether more egregious agenda.


'A Machine they're Secretly Building' is a bravely constructed boat-burning exercise, and the actors are to be commended for nailing their - our - concerns for civil liberty, personal dignity and the survival of democracy to the mast.

If I were to take away a single image of this compelling evening in which the boundaries between acting and ideological integrity were occluded almost beyond recognition, it would be a sequence of film in which a cloudy sky moves slowly against a numinously haunting soundtrack, interrupted by an increasingly desperate female voice delineating the final moments of a journey which ended at the World Trade Center. The silence surrounding words is sometimes more appropriate than the words themselves.

www.settlestories.org.uk/festival
www.proto-type.org