A Machine They’re Secretly Building @ Tron Theatre, Glasgow

A theatrical documentary of sorts, combining archive footage and original video with live performance, A Machine They’re Secretly Building traces the history of the contemporary surveillance state back to its emergence through WWII, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. Unashamedly polemical, Proto-type’s production wears its politics on its sleeve to educate its audience about the panopticon of twenty-first century life, where your every movement is recorded, catalogued, and analysed for potential threat.

This is effective theatre, if a little sleight. On a stark, shadowy stage in the Tron’s Changing House, performers Rachel Baynton and Gillian Lees slip between different voices and modes with ease,  becoming objective narrators, characters both imagined and historical, or apparently just themselves, confessing their anxieties to the audience. Likeable and funny, they employ warmth and wit to challenge an ideology that sees humans as data to be fed into a spreadsheet and any aberration from the algorithmic norm as something suspicious.

 As political analysis, Andrew Westerside’s script is remarkably nuanced given the constraints of the format. Though highly critical of aspects of modern technology, the show never slips into the idealised primitivism of simply rejecting the modern world. When discussing GCHQ, the British spy agency that has gained access to massive amounts of private communications by secretly tapping undersea cables, Baynton and Lees do an an admirable job of picking apart the justifications the establishment gives for the agency’s actions, pointing out that more people are killed by deer in the UK than are killed by terrorism. However, the show could have benefited from investigating the racialised nature of this kind of surveillance: systems that emerge from an outsized fear of ‘Islamic extremism’ inevitably end up hurting people of colour and Muslims the most.

Drawing on declassified documents and leaks from whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, A Machine They’re Secretly Building is theatre for people who read The Intercept, or perhaps for people who should. More than that, though, it provides a model for how to do small-scale educational theatre with nuance, humour, and charm, while staying deeply unnerving in its implications.