London-based actor and writer Eleanor Hill took to the Greenwich Theatre stage to perform her one-woman show Overshare on Friday night, which is currently on until 25 May.
Despite the extensive amount of content warnings, the show, which is written, performed and produced by Hill, is a much-needed analysis of the mental health crisis and “traumatok” floating around in this age of social media.
Overshare is performed through an iPhone, with Hill delivering a sequence of monologues turned into a play, which she originally wrote in 2021 called Sad-Vents.
The actor takes us back to lockdown, bringing up throwbacks to the social media trends that consumed us all at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Credit: Joe Twigg
However, Hill also reminds us that we’re very much in the now when she focuses her live stream on the audience in an uncomfortable moment, so painful that people begin to laugh nervously.
Overshare does not, as the title may suggest, hesitate to cover extremely personal topics from the death of one’s parent, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol use, to the need for approval and suicidal tendencies.
The highly emotive and intense monologues can sometimes feel suffocating, but this is the point.
We cannot get away from social media, and we are forced to consume people’s lives, whether we want to or not.
Hill asks: “Whether we consume social media or if social media consumes us?”
She portrays this brilliantly throughout, particularly as there is no interval and we’re taken on the journey of live streaming and doom scrolling.
This show may be the future of theatre.
Credit: Joe Twigg
During the show, the audience were asked to keep their phones on, take pictures, interact, and send DMs.
Unsurprisingly, a phone never went off, and no audience member was distracted by an usher weaving their way into the stalls to try and hush someone for being on their phone.
It felt like a much more relaxed atmosphere despite the chaos which unfolded on stage.
The collaboration between the audience and the actor was consistent throughout, down to the end when you could go up to the stage to snap a quick picture.
Hill’s consistent use of technology to create her show, with video design from Matt Powell, highlights a new way of producing theatre.
There was always something to look at, whether that be the set, which was an array of messy clothes dumped along the side of the stage to highlight her bedroom, where these live streams took place, or when the audience got to see animations and large projections of her toy squirrel.
The squirrel became a beacon of light and reminded us that, despite the intense trauma, it was still a comedy and we could laugh.
For anyone seeking to engage Gen Z and Gen Alpha in theatre again, the use of modern technology with relatable pop-culture phrases, while at the same time being open and vulnerable, is the way to do it.
It was a captivating and innovative play that used technology to its strengths, and no review will do the play justice until you see it for yourself.
Feature image credit: Joe Twigg
Join the discussion