Writer: Kevin Kautzman
Director: Lydia Parker
Some jobs just need a human eye and for the employees of a social media agency, the reviewing and censoring of video content becomes an eroding experience. Kevin Kautzman’s new play Moderation playing at the Hope Theatre has a great premise and an opportunity to consider not only why human beings perform violent and degrading acts as well as choose to film and post them but also the impact of repeatedly viewing dangerous and unsavoury content on the ordinary workers charged with flagging and reporting them. Instead, Kautzman’s play gets itself in a muddle of office behaviours, colleague aspirations and paranoia about the Orwellian methods of the faceless company they work for.
A new employee, known only as “SHE,” arrives on her first day and is placed with her line manager (“HE”) who guides her through the process of reviewing social media content and the expectations of the company. Expected to complete probation within a month, HE is hopeful his new charge will help him onto the management track at the company while SHE struggles with the rules imposed on her.
Moderation is an overwritten 80-minute piece that has a lot of good ideas but ends up in a cycle of repetition and unnecessary tangents. The strand about the degrading impact of reviewing suspect content is a potentially fascinating one and while Kautzman tracks some impact on HE’s experience across the play including inappropriately an angry outburst, the direct connection between the violent acts he is witnessing for eight hours each day doesn’t fully connect with the PTSD symptoms he displays. With the story set over a few months, the text could better explore the impact on both HE and SHE and the extent to which they become numbed or traumatised by their employment.
Instead, it is implied, that HE’s activities stem from his unreturned attraction to SHE as well as a growing desperation to be promoted. The writer hints at some of the draconian measures the company insists on – tracking eye movements and mouse clicks to ensure the workers are continually busy, restricting their “bio-breaks” to deductible reflections on their performance. Again, this is an alternative avenue to pursue: what is this mysterious company, why are HE and SHE not full employees and what is their purpose in monitoring social media and who for? Neither character shows any interest in discovering the biggest mystery of all, just who is in charge of them.
So Kautzman instead focuses on cyclical lunchtime conversations between HE and SHE, talking about his creative writing and her early struggles to adjust which evolve into odd powerplay games where they humiliate and dominate one another. But it is frustrating to see HE’s paranoid and aggressive behaviour being essentially pacified by SHE until his attraction to her becomes more problematic. Robbie Curran and Alice Victoria Winslow have retained the intricacies of a hefty script but neither character really comes alive because the show is never clear what it wants to do with either of them.
There are several possibilities for developing Moderation, and in a tighter version of the play, the audience needs to know more about the declining mental health of those forced to check explicit and unsafe content while understanding the motivations of shadowy tech giants who control what we see.
Runs until 5 April 2025
The Reviews Hub Score
Muddled
Maryam Philpott’s review of Moderation at the Hope Theatre suggests that Kevin Kautzman’s play “gets itself in a muddle” and struggles to explore its themes with clarity. However, this assessment fundamentally misreads both the structure and impact of the piece. Moderation is a tightly woven and thematically rich play that skilfully examines the psychological toll of social media moderation, the dehumanising nature of corporate structures, and the unsettling realities of a job that requires prolonged exposure to disturbing content.
Philpott claims that the play lacks a strong connection between HE’s PTSD-like symptoms and the work he is doing. In reality, Moderation deliberately avoids didactic storytelling, opting instead for a more nuanced and immersive approach. The psychological deterioration of HE and SHE unfolds gradually, mirroring the insidious way trauma creeps into their lives. To suggest that their experiences are not meaningfully connected to their work overlooks the subtleties of how trauma manifests—often not through obvious breakdowns but through shifts in behaviour, paranoia, and emotional instability, all of which Moderation conveys with precision.
Another claim in the review is that the play spends too much time on “office behaviours, colleague aspirations and paranoia about the Orwellian methods of the faceless company they work for.” But this is precisely what makes the play so effective. The power of Moderation lies in its ability to contextualise its characters’ experiences within the broader reality of the gig economy and corporate surveillance culture. It does not simply depict social media moderation as a horrific job—it asks how a system allows such psychological attrition to continue unchecked. To call these explorations unnecessary tangents is to miss the wider argument the play is making about labour exploitation in the digital age.
Philpott also critiques the play for not making the shadowy company’s motivations clearer. Yet Moderation is not a corporate thriller—it is a psychological drama. The lack of explicit answers about the company is not a flaw but an intentional choice that reinforces the characters’ powerlessness. The audience is placed in the same disorienting, bureaucratic void as HE and SHE, making the play all the more immersive and unsettling.
Far from being overwritten, as Philpott suggests, Moderation is a tightly structured and compelling work that uses its setting—a windowless basement office—to great dramatic effect. The show balances dark humour, corporate absurdity, and psychological tension, ensuring that even those unfamiliar with the specifics of social media moderation can relate to its themes of workplace pressure and emotional resilience.
A more perceptive reading of Moderation would acknowledge that it is not trying to be a straightforward “issue play” about online content moderation but rather an incisive character study about the human cost of digital labour. Dismissing its depth as a muddle of ideas does the play a disservice—it is, in fact, a sharp, urgent, and disturbingly relevant piece of theatre.