Chipper provocateur Hannah Maxwell’s new show leans heavily on an autobiographical account of her secretive work in ‘strategic communications’ during the pandemic era.
Left-leaning, queer, and well-spoken, Maxwell sheepishly walks us through the time she allowed herself to be recruited to not MI5 but what amounts to a sort of clandestine advertising agency, her years of filling in Arts Council funding grants being deemed sufficient qualification by a uni mate who worked there. (To be clear she tell us what she can about it – we don’t find out loads about office life beyond the fact it had a spectacular array of breakfast cereals).
Her rise and fall at the agency makes for a drolly gripping story, her fish-out-of water experience (although to be clear, she was never a spy) ending when she freaked out after her identity came close to being compromised.
This of course all resonates nicely with the show’s wider themes of the way in which big tech and authoritarian regimes manipulate our lives via the data they keep on us, via many routes but most especially our phones. It’s all entertainingly punctuated by a series of jolly diversionary tasks and karaoke numbers Maxwell sets for us as she switches between a series of daft Bond-themed costumes (tux, Blofeld suit, white bikini).
Her rise and fall at a secret agency makes for a drolly gripping story
It’s a well-meaning and interesting show, amusingly delivered, but I felt confused by some of its tonal shifts and logical leaps: maybe my attention span is as bad as Maxwell says the modern human’s is (less than a goldfish!) but moving on from the strategic communications job midway through the show and not returning to it felt jarring; a section where she goes to a country pub while on a digital detox and suggests that it’s a digital-age phenomenon that her and some gammon types were instantly suspicious of each other seemed not especially probable to me. She does want us to turn our fucking phones off (a bit) but she has quite a meandering way of going about it.
To be honest perhaps the real reason it didn’t quite click was that I saw it so close to Hotter Project’s HAM, a similarly impassioned/goofy slice of neo-agitprop also at Summerhall that felt more coherent and considerably more insurrectionary. Still, Maxwell is a clever and unique performer and it’s fun being in her company: if we learn better digital hygiene as a result, it’s a bonus.
