THE NETHER, WRITTEN BY JENNIFER HALEY; DIRECTED BY MOHIT TAKALKAR

It is incredible how much can be achieved in a two-location set with five actors. Walter Benjamin, in his “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” speaks of a performance on-stage versus a performance on-camera, the former being a direct interaction with the audiences, while the latter mediated through a camera and screen; the former is live, while the latter is recorded. Here, Mohit Takalkar’s set includes an interrogation room with a screen that projects a close-up of the characters as they are being interviewed. Cinema put to the service of theatre, a double-sensory arrangement devised to bring us closer to the truth; but not even the eyes betray the imagination of these characters. And that is what the play is all about: Imagination.

The Nether is described as the descendant of the present-day Internet in the near future, a virtual space measured by units of ‘realms’. ‘The Hideaway’, a realm created and managed by a man named Sims (Neil Bhoopalam) is described as one of the most advanced realms to have ever been conceived, since it has perfected recreation of the human senses of smell, sound, touch and thereby successfully recreating ‘real feeling’. Sims is brought into questioning by a Detective Morris (Rytasha Rathore) because ‘The Hideaway’ is a Victorian-themed brothel for paedophiles, described as a ‘safe haven’ for ‘sick’ people who cannot act upon their urges in real life, says Sims. He assures that it follows all regulations of a legal realm, is registered adult, and that there are only adults behind the personae of children as well.

‘The Hideaway’ is not a real place, but a virtual recreation. The people there are not real but avatars under the conditions of anonymity, so nobody knows the real people behind avatars, so people can freely act out their fantasies. Detective Morris is onto what goes on in ‘The Hideaway’ through a spy, a Mr. Woodnut (Prajesh Kashyap). Through him, she gets to a Mr. Doyle (Vivek Madan), a middle-aged science professor, a frequent visitor to ‘The Hideaway’.

Iris is a ‘little girl’ who ‘works’ in ‘The Hideaway’. We are first introduced to her fairly later in the play, in a perfectly unassuming, innocent, playful scene of a child with her uncle or father, except we know that the man is a paedophile. These are in no way easy scenes to watch, and to the credit of the team, they are executed with utmost tact and sensitivity. One of the most shocking visuals is when Iris, welcomingly, fulfilling her programmed duties, lifts her skirt for a client.

The actions that take place in The Hideaway can all be written in quotation marks, because their reality is questioned. Do they really happen? Do people really have intercourse with children? By recreating the details of a child with computer code, is the feeling successfully recreated? Sims calls what he does pornography, advocating for its existence by saying it keeps the sick people off the streets, and gives them a safe outlet to act on their urges without harming anyone. Of-course, the question around which everything revolves, is the question of ‘CONSEQUENCE’. If an action doesn’t have bad consequences, if an action doesn’t harm anyone, then how is it bad? Are actions good and bad purely based on consequence? In one of the most intense pieces of dialogue of the play, Doyle exclaims “but if there has been no consequence, there has been no meaning — no meaning between her and myself, between myself and myself — and if there has been meaning, then I am a monster.”

Another defence of The Hideaway is that it isn’t real but virtual, and censoring it would be the equivalent of censoring imagination, a “thoughtcrime” in Orwellian terms, loaded with fascistic implications. Imagination, after all, must be absolute. The problem here is that we’re not dealing with the individual imagination of a single person, but the imaginations of more than one person interacting in a space, a sort of collective imagination. And where there is to be mutual existence, rules will follow. Further, what or who guarantees that a paedophile will indeed be satiated in The Hideaway, and not more emboldened or encouraged to act out his tendencies in the real world. The questions are endless, and we haven’t even ventured into the realm of AI laws and ethics, a topic for another place.

Paedophilia, however, is not at the heart of this play. Nor is it as much about the Internet and “reality” as such, as it is about love and acceptance, feeling and truth.

One of the most overlooked aspects that repeats more than once in the play, is the apparent importance of the existence of reality, even by those who want to completely “cross over” into the Nether world. The promise of the Nether World is that it is better than reality. It is an escape. The real world is described by dystopian overtures, where trees are a rarity, and in this backdrop, the Nether World, especially The Hideaway offers an escape so alluring, it is accused of luring in perfectly normal people and making them do hideous things against their will. Perhaps, one must recall Plato’s Ring of Gyges, a ring that grants its wearer complete freedom from consequences of his actions. Behind the curtain of anonymity, in the absolute freedom of a virtual reality, men are free to act out their fantasies without any real consequence, except there is. Papa knows this, and that is why he has in place rules that ensure the smooth functioning of The Hideaway. It is in The Hideaway, after all, where Iris falls for Papa, and Mr. Woodnut falls for Iris.

What really transcends this play, with its strict structure of a crime procedural, is the epilogue, a word-to-word rehashing of a conversation between Iris and Papa on a dainty afternoon in The Hideaway, only they are now their real-world forms, Doyle and Sims, in the interrogation room. At its heart, they acknowledge that they exchanged love through their avatars, but they were the ones who felt it. Sims loved a middle-aged man in the persona of a little girl, and when confronted with the fact, the play turns from a commentary on paedophilia and Virtual ethics, to one on gender issues, homophobia and the fleeting nature of human identity in general.

The Epilogue is a tricky one to execute and it would suffer under a lesser-abled team. But under the sensitive, underscored direction of Mohit Takalkar, the subtle exchange between Sims and Doyle (the first time they meet), their close-ups superimposed on each other, gives the audiences a powerful central image to go home with, one that would linger for a long time.

The Nether puts the internet as the next progressive step of the collective human consciousness in the evolution of its ‘Geist’. Through the advancements of the Nether ‘realms’, humans can truly free themselves from their bodies and be whoever they want to be, a truer, manifest freedom of the spirit, a sort of nirvana, a death of the physical body. Even in such a transcending state, the writer reminds us, there is no escape from such problems that we so aptly describe as ‘the human condition’.