Writers: Kieran Dee and Grace Millie
Director: Harriet Marsh
This thinly disguised lampoon of Elon Musk and X is bang on the money for topicality. But despite the sterling work of the three actors, Moon Loaf’s Insult to Injury isn’t sinister enough to induce us all to close down our social media accounts.
It is Ellis and Kat’s job to remove anything offensive from the live feeds of a social media platform like Twitter. They are the third and final line of defence. First, there are the moderators somewhere in a warehouse. Referred to as the ‘sin-eaters’, the moderators review the most brutal and gory videos so that the public never gets to see them. Then there’s the AI, but while it’s trained to flag various images, it doesn’t know how to put them in context and cannot understand nuance. And finally, come Ellis and Kat.
The pair is certainly efficient, zealous even. In a few years, the number of banned accounts on the platform has risen from the thousands to the millions. Ellis and Kat celebrate that they have made the internet safer. However, when creepy businessman Vos takes over the company, profit is prioritised over ethics. Money and a desire to cause chaos are at the root of Vos’s narcissism. He makes no mention of wanting to democratise the internet.
While Nick Hardie is excellently repulsive as the mullet-haired Vos, loafing around the office in flip-flops, the presence of a third character perhaps is unnecessary. Mediated through email or telephone, Vos’s menace could be more insidious if played from off-stage.
Oxbridge-educated Kat, played by Grace Millie, is the show’s moral heart. It is she who is outraged by Laurence Fox’s post of a swastika made up of freedom flags and the Prime Minister’s call for violence. Millie gives Kat a strong conscience, full of resolve.
In contrast to Kat’s forthrightness, Kieran Dee’s Ellis is more diplomatic, but this attribute only makes him weak in the face of such an enemy as Vos. Ellis has principles but doesn’t know how to use them for the common good. Ellis is an Everyman, and Dee, in a winning performance, plays him as such.
Director Harriet Marsh whips enough humour out of Dee and Millie’s script and the 70-minute show, all comprised of short scenes, zips along quite nicely. However, Insult to Injury is not the twisty moral maze it could be. It’s too easy to pick a side.
Runs until 13 April 2024
