Turn Your F*cking Phones Off, The Front Room, Croydon
Opening the Croydonites Festival of New Theatre, Hannah Maxwell's one-woman show, Turn Your F*cking Phones Off, is an excoriating look at misinformation, data manipulation and the toxicity of social media.
The piece has already won a slew of awards, including The Stage Fringe Five of Edinburgh's Breakout Theatremakers. Maxwell’s performance is part Ted Talk, part autobiographical stand-up, as she describes her phone addiction and attempt to detox. And a secret job that she shouldn't talk about, but does. The focus on how big tech and shadowy crypto-corporations systematically harvest individuals' data and manipulate algorithms to create societal division, skew politics, control people and money is frighteningly topical, relevant and important. There's talk of Russian troll farms...