Guidelines Review – Teens try to escape the aftermath of a murder caught on phone | stage

WIts pieces together fragments. Distorted voice notes, the depth of a comments section, and snippets of conversation make up James Nash’s Little Nightmare. By deconstructing the internet and the violence it hosts, The Guidelines traces the aftermath of a murder filmed on a phone, as its impact ripples outward into real life and onto our screens.

Pip Williams’ clean direction is immediately unsettling. Rachel Leah Husker and Alex McCauley oscillate between social media social guidelines with constant, fierce smiles, playing a pair of teens unable to escape the story of the girl who was murdered in the woods. Patch Middleton’s sound design keeps the tension up from the start, with a resounding message from a worried mother turning into an ominous threat.

The production echoes the scrolling reaction. The tattered script, sometimes overly reliant on menus, loops and jumps, such that our short attention spans provoke us to consume another slice of horror between cat clips and silly dances. Parents and teachers search for the right words of comfort and protection, while guidelines specify only phrases to cover their backs.

The text is intentionally ambiguous. We get specific details about the gore, but names and character traits are absent. Navigating the context-free world that makes up so much of our online interaction suggests the universality of the dangers of social media alongside the cruelty of teenage girls, but the lack of specificity keeps the emotion of the story we are being told at bay. The play’s finale pushes for safe satire, but the strength of this production lies in its efforts to capture the heightened feeling of watching horror online, questioning our ability to consume and be consumed with violence.