Review – Notoriously Yours
After having sex with a man she met on Tindr, a woman is taken in by the government for questioning – her anonymous lover was a whistleblower, wanted for threats to national security. She finds herself embroiled in a contemporary spy drama, manipulated by agents to help them bring down a suspected crime ring in Singapore. five.point.one have clearly put a lot of effort into this play – the program reveals a Pozible campaign and a sizeable production staff. It’s a shame it hasn’t quite paid off.
Bluntly, the play is hollow. The writing is empty – characterization is sacrificed for snappy banter and pithy one-liners. We know so little about our unnamed heroine that the details we do get are made ridiculous by their sparseness. Unnamed Woman: thirty, works “in retail”, daughter of an escaped Serbian war criminal. Even then, that’s a whole lot more than we get about anyone else. It’s true that anonymity is an integral idea here – personal information is power, privacy is freedom – but there’s a line between characters with secrets and characters with no substance. Who on earth is Spy #1? He has almost as much stage time as the heroine and yet his suit is still more memorable than literally anything else about him.
What’s more, the story is shaky, contrived and profoundly unbelievable. Much of the action is taken up by the heroine’s Singapore spy mission, which would strain credibility in a James Bond film. Sure, she’s got (narratively convenient!) connections to the crime mob because of her father, but sending an untrained, untested civilian woman into deep cover to fake-marry the kingpin of a dangerous criminal organization? A major subplot is her confusing, stilted romance with the steely-eyed Spy #1, who spends a lot of his stage time heaping shame on her for having sex, including the sex he ordered her to have for her mission. If this profound hypocrisy was a critical comment on patriarchal attitudes to female sexuality, it needed to be interrogated, not just represented. Speaking of sexism – defining your sole female character (and protagonist no less) by a) her relationships with men and b) her impressive ability to get men to have sex with her is not only problematic, it’s boring.
Via projection, we also see bits of an interview with the mysterious whistleblower our protagonist slept with in the opening scene. He’s an interesting figure with real-world analogues galore, so it’s a shame he buggers off to Iceland while we faff about with an unrelated plot in Singapore. There’s a distinct sense of Brechtian distancing here. The idea is for elements of staging and performance to remind the audience that they are watching a fictional work, which encourages more focused critical engagement with what that work is suggesting. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot being said here, so the effect is just plain alienation. Not ideal.
The play’s final moral is weak, because the story fails to support it. The message projected onto the stage at the end is to ‘end surveillance now’. But most of the heroine’s problems come from being bossed around by spies threatening her hospitalized father, not from the surveillance state. You don’t need to tap a phone to threaten a sick old man. The story isn’t realistic enough to drive the message it wants to drive – and, paradoxically, its attempted focus on that message alienates its audience from the story it’s actually telling.
Notoriously Yours needed to make a decision. Tell us a contemporary spy story – deception, intrigue, exotic foreign lands, poisoning, romance, fatal attraction, complex schemes, dramatic confrontations; or produce an incisive work that gets into the nitty-gritty of the surveillance state – break it down, interrogate it, examine the realities, examine the political, moral and ethical consequences. Show us why it needs to stop. Don’t try to inject political depth into a half-hearted spy drama by sticking a three-word slogan on a screen. A kid with a can of spray paint could do that.
