Clickbait by Milly Thomas
Theatre503,
The Latchmere,
503 Battersea Park Road, London SW11 3BW
Tuesday 19th January – Saturday 13th February 2016
Clickbait is a darkly comic new play about society’s attitude to porn and the women who make it for themselves.
From the exciting all female writer/director team behind A First World Problem (Milly Thomas and Holly Race Roughan) comes this blistering study of how pornography is
changing women's relationship to sex in the 21st Century.
What was the inspiration for Clickbait?
Milly - I first got the idea after reading a news story a while back about a young girl who had gone on holiday to Magaluf and performed a sex act in a club in exchange for a holiday. I remember being particularly shocked at the bile that ensued and for some reason the story wouldn’t let me go.
It made me look at myself and my sisters and friends and wonder about us all. About what we’d do. I had a conversation with Holly that turned into a first draft which then grew and turned into a story about sisters, the porn industry, the world of business, the internet and sexual politics.
How did you go about gathering the team for it?
Holly - Milly and I worked on her debut play A First World Problem last year at 503. This production was a turning point for me as a young director as it was the beginning of a real sense of who I was as an artist and having an exhilarating clarity on my aesthetic taste.
I had a great team of peers working on this show, including the actor / movement director Katie Payne, JMK Award designer Frankie Bradshaw and the brilliant recently graduated producer Jessica Campbell. After Milly sent me the first draft of Clickbait earlier this year I was determined to reassemble this inspired female team. Milly’s writing to me is pulsing, youthful and often outrageous, and it demands bold decisions from its Creatives. I can’t wait to see what we all make together. It’s a generation Y play with a generation Y team!
What made you decide on Theatre 503?
Holly - Theatre503 has supported Milly and I as a pairing for the last two years. It has become a safe space for us to make bold choices, and to develop as artists. Having been Assistant Director / Associate Director at the NT, RSC, and Royal Court in the past two years, there is a feeling of coming home to be back on the fringe, but in such a well-supported environment. The artistic team at this venue have such integrity and a rigorous attitude to new writing. Theatre503 has had a great year, and we are excited to be kicking off 2016 for them.
Was your process typical in of the way you develop a play?
Milly - I would say this has been particularly unusual process in that while it is subject matter I’m chomping at the bit to talk about, this structure is somewhat of a departure for me, but feels right for this. Holly is an excellent dramaturg and I always leave sessions feeling fired and wanting to shake it all up. It’s been exciting to watch it grow into something that Holly and I proud of that we can’t wait to share.
What do you hope the audience will experience?
Milly - I honestly don’t know – but I hope whatever they do experience gets them talking about how they feel. Auditioning for Clickbait was fascinating as we had so many people come in with such extreme reactions to the script which was really exciting. Some people said they felt empowered, others said they felt horrified, so I’m really looking forward to seeing people’s reactions and hearing the discussions.
Do you see your work within any particular tradition?
Milly - I feel very lucky to be a playwright right now. There is a current wave of voices that make me so excited about British theatre. It feels pressing and immediate and it gets people talking. Writing is my way of documenting the world as I see it and my way of having discussions with people and making some noise. The creatives on our team, Holly, Jessica Campbell, Jack Sain, Katie Payne and Frankie Bradshaw are all young people with vision and guts. I’m thrilled to be working with them all again and getting messy.
Are there any other questions that might help me to understand the meaning of dramaturgy in your work?
Holly - Dramaturgy to me is a shape-shifting role - it comes in so many different forms and is completely different for each writer I work with. Sometimes it is just about reading the near finished draft and asking the right questions, and at other times it has taken me and the playwright days of knocking the play around with actors in a room.
Milly and I have a very personal and practical dramaturgical relationship, we tend to roll our sleeves up very early on in a process and discuss what Milly wants the play to be, and we go through many drafts. Scenes get cut and then added back, the play goes through different structures, we discuss the characters, their relationships, then we cut characters, add new characters, and we have been known to change whole sub plots. It is extremely collaborative and intensive process, but thrilling. It is underpinned by a long friendship that allows a shorthand and trust between us.
1. They are called Paper Doll Militia
What's not to love in this name? They have been called the love-child of Tim Burton and Trent Reznor (by a critic with a greater gift than mine), and the name evokes whimsical fun and hardcore art action in three words.
2. They did it last year
Their short piece at manipulate 2014 last year was an elegant spectacle of white silk and spiralling skills - an abstract, evocative and forceful display of strength. Both technically and emotionally powerful, it presented a duo who could use physical theatre as a medium for direct, stunning, self impression.
3. They've gone metal
This year's entry, Unchained, swaps the silks for chains, raising the game and bringing an uncompromising symbolism into the very apparatus that they use. With themes of oppression and betrayal, Unchained is a heavier outing (with a few industrial touches in the soundtrack).
4. It's not all circus
The Militia are as much about the choreography as the swinging about the rooftops: apart from taking on a serious subject - and refusing some dull rhetorical lecture on betrayal - they use the dark poetry of physical theatre to go beyond the tricks and go to work on the subject.
5. This one's ecriture feminine
That is: this is no narrative based story with an easy interpretation. It swings and soars, both literally and metaphorically, working with a non-linear approach and delving into symbolism, meaning and action through a variety of attacks. No simple answers, only the invitation for an audience to get thinking...
It's time.
On the whole, I try to avoid ad hominem arguments: I prefer to critique the product, not the artist. I make an exception for Charlie Brooker, because of his years insulting various TV puppets personally. And I am going to add The Amazing Atheist to this list of two, because it is just too tempting to laugh at his bellowing coupon.
This isn't an argument against atheism - the ontological category of the divine is beyond my remit. It is a click-bait list of good reasons why some people ought to spend less time videoing themselves and more time thinking.
1. Atheism is not a badge of intelligence.
The Amazing Atheist is convinced he is rational. Let's take his analysis of a small group of Christians who are trying to address their worries about pornography use.
Over forty minutes, in which he debunks every post on one of their discussion threads, TAA makes public his own use of pornography (not a surprise, I suppose), and demonstrates how the absence of God means that pornography is okay. There is no sense of doubt, only the constant damning of the opposition, with natural selection evoked every so often as a specious excuse for TAA to spend his life in wankorama.
Taking a group of young Christians is hardly an intellectual challenge - there are coherent arguments against pornography elsewhere, that include statistics and all sorts of scientific evidence. Bellowing profanity does not make TAA the heir to Aristotle, and this sort of tilting at weak windmills is probably something TAA copied from The Blind Watchmaker itself.
2. Shouting at a video is not dialectic.
It is not any sort of accepted intellectual argument. TAA's strategy is to take a video that disagrees with his position, take it personally, play bits of it and shout at them. That sounds pretty entertaining, in the same way that watch a tramp slug cider, claim that the government are reading his mind, piss himself and fall over.
My favourite example is during one of his countless tirades against feminism. He gets angry that his description of a blogger (in one of his other tirades) as 'a stick with tits' has been construed as sexist.
If you need it explained why that is sexist, you are reading the wrong blog.
3. Natural Selection does not explain everything.
In a masterful essay, Stephen Jay Gould (not always an impeccable
source, but a professional biologist and a life-long rationalist) explore the bizarre reasoning that allowed evolutionary biologists to ascribe adaptive meaning to the colour of flamingo's feathers. The reductionist version of natural selection - which TAA appears to accept - is that everything must be determined by its use for either survival or reproduction.
Turns out that the feathers are pink because they eat shrimp, and the colour has no evolutionary meaning. It must be possible to find one, given enough imagination on the part of the investigator. But that's not scientific method.
When TAA justified pornography using natural selection (we are driven by the need to have sex, so masturbation), he drives his golf-buggy of science into the dunes and sandpits of unreason. Frankly, the opposite argument - that masturbation is bad because he ought to be saving his sacred sperm for reproduction only - is stronger. But equally stupid.
4. You are part of the patriarchy.
There's a picture of Nietzsche on the wall behind TAA is a few of his rants. Nietzsche once pondered why, after the death of God, people are still using grammar.
His point is - why hasn't the shift in theological perspectives led to a change in the way humanity communicates. The idea of God has dominated the way that humanity thought about itself for thousands of year (at least in Europe). Isn't the death of this idea an opportunity for new ways of thinking?
Sadly, patriarchy is a tougher stain to shift. I don't share the conspiracy theory that the patriarchy is still in full effect - there is a dialectic tension between feminist and patriarchal models that is shaping contemporary British society - but I do believe that the dominant modes of communication owe a great deal to traditional masculine privilege.
Again, while some of the claims against prominent atheists may be malicious, the sheer number of complaints against male atheists in the 'atheism plus movement' keeps TAA in rants against the woolly minded feminist conspiracy. Seriously, dude, it might be worth thinking that the women have a point.
5. A bit of humility would not hurt.
I just read his meme page. He is worse than I thought.
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