Flip! – Soho Theatre, London

Writer: Racheal Ofori

Director: Emily Aboud

Carleen and Crystal are friends who have formed a double act – “CC” – and are starting out as video content creators. For Crystal (Jadesola Odunjo) the appeal is becoming an influencer; for Leah St Luce’s Carleen, who is finding post-graduate life to be a succession of rejections from dead-end jobs, the prospect of an income is more alluring.

Social media, its pervasiveness and the distortions it places on perceptions of reality are explored with equal measures of deep insight and great hilarity in Racheal Ofori’s Flip!. St Luce and Odunjo capture many recognisable mannerisms that have built up among video creators, and the fictional world that Ofori has created – where YouTube is replaced by WePipe, retweets are rechirps, BuzzFeed is HumBee, and so on – is both instantly recognisable and just the right side of litigation-friendly.

Initially, it seems as if the target of Ofori’s satire is going to be about body image, and the unreasonable expectations social media places upon young people, especially girls and young women. Reference to filters that alter physical appearances to be more attuned to an aesthetic that prioritises thin white women abound, while digs at make-up vloggers and their overly complex beauty routines raise interesting points as well as mining the satire to perfection.

But the real meat comes with the arrival of a new video site which prioritises very short, highly viral video content at the expense of harvesting users’ and creators’ personal data. Flip’s corollary in the real world is instantly recognisable from the way CC find themselves repeating the same jokes with different punchlines, creating memes that punch through into a wider context in the process. St Luce and Odunjo have fun playing commenters, news reporters and more to expand Ofori’s world beyond the boundaries of the social media sites themselves.

There is also an undercurrent of the corrupting influence of social media capitalism from the outset. Initially, St Luce’s Carleen is the more ethically minded of the pair, resisting Odunjo’s pleas to move their content to Flip because of the site’s ethical issues until the prospect of monetisation becomes too strong to resist.

And if Flip! stopped there, it would be a devastatingly funny critique of the current state of social media. But Ofori pushes the envelope even further, contemplating where such platforms may be heading in future. The rise of generative AI may lead, she posits, to a point where influencers’ videos could become completely computer generated, where physical and vocal likenesses can be manipulated to say and do anything.

As Carleen and Crystal split up and go their separate ways, Ofori focuses on Carleen’s descent from moralist to money grabber, signing away her “AI image footprint” to a digital agency that uses her likeness for all sorts of endorsements. Some ingenious sound design from Eliyana Evans, alongside sterling work from St Luce, delineates the “real” Carleen from the computer-generated one even as the former degenerates into a managed, homogenised simulacrum.

The more relatable elements of the satire keep coming, from excruciating apology videos to attempts by old media journalists to appear “down with the kids”. Alongside those, the AI angle feels a little out of place, almost absolving Carleen of direct responsibility for some of her actions. But by including an extrapolation of where social media is going, it gives a potential longevity to Flip! where a state-of-the-online-nation snapshot of the way things currently are would quickly expire.

That means that Flip! is able to combine a hilarious, on-the-nose satire about the state of internet influencer culture with a warmth and affection for its two lead characters that shines through. Ofori’s play should be seen by anyone who is addicted to creating, or consuming, TikTok videos. If only they can be prised away from their phones long enough.

Continues until 25 November 2023