REVIEW: MODERATION at The Hope Theatre 19 March – 5 April 2025

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'part philosophical musing, part a darkly satirical workplace two-hander‘ ★★★

How do you stay sane if your job is combing through the most horrific material mankind has ever produced? That's the question playwright Kevin Kautzman asked himself in 2019, ‘after reading online that many content moderators had begun to believe the conspiracy theories they had been tasked to flag for removal.’ 

Moderation is part philosophical musing, part a darkly satirical workplace two-hander. ‘He’ (Robbie Curran) is the neurotic, anxious old hand, teetering on the edge of the insanity he's paid to censor. ‘She’ (Alice Victoria Winslow) is the manifestly normal newcomer, though one with some unexpected tricks up her sleeve. He becomes increasingly obsessed with She, and anyone who's stumbled across incel content online can guess where this is leading. 

He and She sit at a shared desk, keyboards but no screens in front of them. Instead, they narrate what they are seeing. Some of it is merely bizarre: "I am looking at a video of Bigfoot.’ Some is stomach-turning: ‘I am watching a video of Mussolini and his what, wife, girlfriend, mistress hang on meat hooks.’ It's a neat narrative trick that ropes in our own imaginations to do the work, making the audience conjure up images that are (probably) worse than what any pub production could get away with showing, even in an event marked 18+. 

It is only at the kick-off and in scene transitions that actual video footage is shown, always projected against the back wall—slightly surreal, black-and-white collages (Abbie Lucas) deftly interwoven with an effective score (Shawn Phillips). It's a nice stylistic touch that I yearned for more of. For a show about societal dystopias and online horrors and unnamed characters narrating their thoughts, the staging (Lydia Parker) was strangely, and disappointingly, naturalistic. 

On the one hand, this feels like a series of missed visual opportunities. More importantly, it saps the scenes of tension. She and He work for the nigh-on omniscient ‘Company’, one with the capability to track each mouse click, each eye movement, each second spent on a ‘bio break’ (i.e., the toilet). But apart from a few corporate-speak signs tacked against the walls, there's little sign of this entity's presence. The working periods never feel sickeningly overwhelming; the break times don't feel like (false) relief. The extent to which He and She are (or are not) trapped and their colleagues can (or cannot) hear them scream is not defined, to the detriment of the show's climax. The characters' words may tell us that they are in a shared pressure chamber, but we don't really feel it.

The default to blandly naturalistic imagery also makes the actors' lives harder. Moderation ends up being as much about the twisted dynamics between two people as it is about conspiracy theories. He injures her arm on Day 1; She threatens to report him for sexual harassment if he doesn't do as she says. The casualness with which the actors move in and share the space, however, undercuts their power plays. If only, I found myself wishing, they could stop shifting chairs and pacing around desks for the sake of site lines. The fault lies not in the acting, which is effective on both parts, but in the staging.

Moderation has plenty of teeth, but could use a more vicious bite.

BOX OFFICE https://www.thehopetheatre.com/moderation

Cast

He: Robbie Curran

She: Alice Victoria Winslow

Creatives

Writer: Kevin Kautzman

Director: Lydia Parker

Producer: Suzette Coon

Video Designer: Abbie Lucas

Sound Designer: Ryan Condon

Composer: Shawn Phillips

Lighting Designer: Jack Hathaway

Stage Manager: Nathan Friend