Writer: Ben Hatt
Director: Hannah Eidinow
The one-act drama is a tricky discipline, a challenge for writers who need to create credible worlds, rounded characters and plot with limited time to delve deeply into any of the playwrighting pillars. Ben Hatt’s Imposed has an interesting premise and something to say about the sudden impact of deep-fake pornography with limited legal redress, but hasn’t yet found the balance between the small details needed to sustain the concept and the temptation to generate a bit too much story. As a result, the quest for a neat resolution sacrifices subtlety and audience investment.
Flatmates Kate and Allie are floored when they discover their images have been used to create deep-fake porn. Kate has a hangover after a wild night in, while softball-playing Allie has had an early start, rushing home so the pair can go out to see the last of the cherry blossoms with their friend Mark. Realising there is little they can do, the friends soon start to unpick how this happened, and the trail leads them to a surprising discovery.
Hatt’s play starts well, focusing on the small details as Kate comes to and spends some time recovering from her drunken evening, and the audience observes her melodramatic phone calls, queasiness and slow return to consciousness as she prepares for the day. But what follows once she receives the email alerting her to the porn site suddenly speeds up and moves to the other extreme with a huge amount of fast-paced story as the flatmates identify the culprit, confront them and face the consequences all in the final 15-minutes of the show, creating an uneven structure and pacing.
The writer’s thematic interest in Washington-based stories, sexual misconduct and social media are strongly conveyed, a little expositional at times, but guiding the audience through the legal implications and hopelessness for Kate and Allie, even if their character trajectories are accelerated to find a shock ending. Yet the 45-minute format demands more mystery than Imposed has to offer, and in developing this, the creative team, including director Hannah Eidinow, could consider how the play could expand to fill a much longer slot, delving deeper into character behaviour and crucially developing motivation for the perpetrator, which feels weak here. Alternatively, as a one-act play, Imposed could leave more open questions, letting the audience sit with the notion that the flatmates have no sensible way out, or opening with a flashforward to that dramatic final scene and spooling back to generate some dramatic momentum.
Performers Elizabeth Colwell as Kate and Josselyn Ryder as Allie do a good job at suggesting the shock and upset of their discovery, particularly in the middle of an ordinary day and how this becomes a consuming moment in their lives. There is more to investigate in how the women know one another and why their suspicions fall in particular directions to prevent this from being all reaction, while the role of the cherry blossom could be used more pointedly either as a Chekhovian symbol of futile decline or the beauty/violence metaphor it holds in anime.
There is a lot of material here and a number of ways to develop it into something more substantial, either as a longer piece or a more finely crafted one-act play.
Runs until 16 January 2026
