The Believers are but Brothers: A dark web
Online theatre review
Oxford Playhouse: The Believers are but Brothers, on YouTube, on Friday, November 6
Review by Jon Lewis
JAVAAD Alipoor’s Edinburgh Fringe First winning one-man play, The Believers are but Brothers begins and ends with Alipoor playing a shoot’em up video game.
The game is a simulation for the real-life desires of three young men Alipoor has fictionalised after carrying out interviews over the internet. For them, Call of Duty becomes a mission, not a game. Broadcast live on YouTube by the Oxford Playhouse, the play today is full of ironies unforeseen when produced on stage. The global pandemic has led us to a screen to engage with Alipoor, a pied piper taking us out of our comfort zones. We are like the characters in the drama: remote but connected, unseen but present.
Some members of the audience during the show volunteer to join Alipoor in a WhatsApp group to share facts unseen by other viewers, mimicking the exclusivity of the offer by radicals to impressionable internet surfers.
Alipoor is an engaging personality, a raconteur whose confessional style draws the audience to his own life story. Alipoor is a mixed-race Shiite socialist from Manchester, at opposite ends of the spectrum to Atif, Marwan and Ethan, the loners who are groomed by agents on social media. Their grievances against liberals, feminists and freethinkers are magnified by the lens held up by propagandists with a gallery of violent videos. Atif and Marwan become actively involved in terrorism, travelling to Syria, one covertly, the other with a bona fide charity, but are fish out of water when they arrive.
Alipoor does not assume that his audience knows a lot about religious or secular fundamentalism, so spends some time explaining the key thinkers who provide ideological foundations for violent beliefs. He comes across as amused by the memes and in-jokes that pervade the darker reaches of the internet, chatrooms that attract like-minded single men who gain a sexual power over women by clicking a button. Alipoor suggests that we are only three clicks away from being caught by the Obscene Publications and Prevention of Terrorism Acts.
Co-directed by Kirsty Housley, with mesmerising sound effects and camera effects, this online production is a potent cautionary tale.
