Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Shôn Dale-Jones.

George Orwell got it wrong.

We are not afraid, cowering in our rooms writing in subversive diaries and avoiding confrontation with our neighbours, we have become experts at exposing the very potential that makes us spies for the state, unpaid, unregulated emissaries willing to be praised for bringing to light the slightest misdemeanour in which our friends can suffer the brutality and want of the baying righteous mob.

We have become adept at showing a moment in time between two people as something that it is not, of stirring up hatred and dislike of another for something was meaningless, perhaps even found funny between the two people but which annoys the sensibility of the one filming the encounter to the point of making sure others are informed and advised to be just as disgusted as they have been.

Gossip, humanity’s greatest failing, and one to which the modern unsolicited film maker, “unethical journalist” takes pride in for the reward of a few likes in cyber space, and one to which the intensely likeable Shôn Dale-Jones relishes in and explores in his brand new one man play, Cracking.

All things start out innocent, and no more so than that which passes an expression of a joke between family members, and as Shôn revisits his old home to aid his mother as she faces the prospect of ill health, so a moment in which an egg is jokingly cracked upon her head as she loses a bet is seen by one person who senses as story that is not there, so the internet trolls, the local villagers on Anglesey, the police, and the wider world all come to vilify and descend upon the young man; driving him to the point of exhaustion and retaliation.

Despite its gentle beginnings, Cracking is the basis of a wider discussion, one to which Orwell’s own allusion to state interference and control could not has envisaged; for we as a society now believe it is a right to be outraged over the innocent display of fun between two people who get along, the screams of abuse, though possibly well intentioned, are not delivered with concern, but with an eye to be internet famous. The network of civilian spies found to working for The Stasi in East Germany after World War Two has nothing on the potential of willing supporters now, all geared up with their phones, willing to pounce on the most seemingly innocent moment and turn it into a drama of consequence.

A telling tale, one wrapped in the memory of what once passed for a simple life, but which like an eggshell is soon to be found fragile and easy to bring the contents inside to the boil and destroy in seconds.

Ian D. Hall