Change is the only constant online – like stepping into a fast-moving river, you’ll never click on the same Twitter thread twice. If the news cycle turns on a day, then Twitter turns by the hour. A cancelled celebrity will have a book deal and a Netflix Original before the week is over, while an online hero will become a villain in minutes.
Suzie Miller’s newest play at Malthouse Theatre brings Leo Tolstoy’s 1878 classic, Anna Karenina, to the online age. Anna K (Caroline Craig), a cut-throat journalist for '8pm: In Depth', finds herself embroiled in scandal. Her affair with a past interviewee, Lexi (Callan Colley), an élite SAS soldier seventeen years her junior, is leaked to the press while the pair lie in bed after a passionate weekend away. Holed up in a plaid hotel room, Anna watches her world destroyed through her phone screen.
Miller’s previous work, Prima Facie, toured nationally to sold out shows, and premiered on West End this year with actress Jodie Comer at the helm. From the outset, Prima Facie moved with the cut-throat pace of a trained thoroughbred, transporting audiences into the world of high-court politics with a confidence that offered a damning portrait of the treatment of victims of sexual assault. Anna K, however, is less sure-footed, representing the world of Australian media with cursory references and sweeping generalisations that represent our contemporary online landscape with a regressive didacticism.
With her affair exposed, Anna becomes a lightning rod for online vitriol. Her scandal trends for days – a rare occurrence in the realms of Australian celebrity culture – while paparazzi circle her hotel in wait. Stuck in her room, Anna fields calls from her producers, co-workers and ten-year old son, all of whom reprimand her for her misdeeds and encourage her to return to a loveless marriage.
These are plot points taken straight from Tolstoy’s sweeping novel, so too the moralism that colour them. It is cancellation according to the conservative morality of 1870s Russia, with Anna branded by a scarlet letter in the form of the hashtag, #annagate. However, contemporary audiences will find it difficult to believe that Anna would lose her career over an extramarital affair, or that her husband would have reason to fight for sole custody of her child as a result. Likewise, it is hard to accept K’s surprise at the hate she receives online considering she has worked as a journalist for over fifteen years.
Beneath the surface lies a damning portrait of the all-too-real misogyny proliferated in online spaces, but any such critique is lost in translation, sapped of any topical urgency by the show’s inability to shake its literary origins. Today, cancel culture has a plural of meanings, none of which Miller seems interested in investigating. Instead, ‘social media’ is cast as the big bad wolf, a shadowy realm made up of death threats and misogyny alone.
Ironically, this characterisation recycles the binary thinking so often associated with social media sites like Twitter. But Twitter is a dual pronged platform – a rhetorical hot bed that can popularise a campaign like #MeToo and air conspiracy theories or spread misinformation in the same breath. It is too easy to demonise it, so too the people who use it. Much of Anna K’s politics denies this complexity in an effort to drive home its insipid moralising, erasing the double-edge in online cancellations, where attacks are often equalled by support.
Simplistic dialogue does not help resolve this problem. Sub-text is almost entirely absent from the script (developed together with director Carissa Licciardello). Characters air their grievances with an explicitness that leaves little room for ambiguity. Clichés abound as Anna tells us in no uncertain terms how we should be feeling and, most frustratingly, what we should be learning from her story.
Craig tries her utmost to make the script’s stilted dialogue seem organic, but conversations end up feeling like an assemblage of semi-related tweets beneath a general hashtag, and many of the actors stumble over thinly drawn segues. And with very little passion between them, Craig and Colley’s relationship quickly buckles under pressure, making it increasingly difficult to understand why Anna would sacrifice her livelihood for such a dull affair.
The supporting characters that visit Anna (each played by Louisa Mignone) are relegated to pious caricatures, and it is often unclear whether we should laugh at their exaggerated judgements of Anna’s actions or be maddened by them. As remarkably similar characters enter and exit, the show falls into a predictable rhythm that recycles the same moral touch stones. All the while, we remain stuck in a hotel room with an unchanging view - a misogynistic insult written in neon (Anna Cordingley’s Set Design is frustratingly underutilised).
As the plot lumbers forward, the show begins to stagnate. But there are occasional glimpses of the writing that energised Miller’s Prima Facie. Before its conclusion Anna K allows Craig to sink her teeth into a monologue that casts Anna in the dual role of interviewer and interviewee. As she flips between both positions, she personifies the ways in which online criticism can be internalised. The impassioned plea she concludes with boasts an emotional resonance largely absent from previous scenes. Finally, Joe Paradise Lui’s minimalistic but affecting compositions finds a worthy pairing.
We end with an intriguing glimpse into an alternate version of this play had it been structured in an elaborate monologue like its predecessor. Appearing at the eleventh hour, this scene is too late to redeem the show. And, as Anna K concludes with another predictable appearance from a forgettable side-character, we return to a well-worn formula and a boring sterility that – as any celebrity will tell you – is poison to remaining relevant online.