White Hat Hackers

Billed as the story of a ‘self-confessed Internet addict… [who] stumbles on Krows Bar Kabaret – a special branch of the wildly subversive White Hat Hackers’, this black comedy cabaret show satirises our contemporary obsessions with on-line stuff and how it can take over our lives. 

The Internet addict, Craig (the program gives only the five performers’ names, but not roles), is trapped in a metal structure on wheels: he can move but can’t escape.  He taps furiously on a keyboard throughout the show – as he tells us his life story and he’s assailed by the White Hat Hackers. 

In sixteen songs, they provide a kind of wry/mocking commentary on his story and on modern Life in general.  Behind Craig and the Hackers, a screen features the flames of Hell and a series of emoticons reflecting Craig’s mental state.  A ‘voice of God’ booms from speakers, teasing and questioning.  Downstage, a three-piece band - composer and lyricist Ella Filar on keyboard, Helen Bower on violin and Martin Zakharov or David Laity on saxophone and clarinet – accompanies the songs.  It’s a rich mix.

Clearly a lot of thought and invention has gone into this show – the graphics, the all-white costumes, hats and make-up and the Hackers’ choreography, not to mention the complex songs.  But just possibly there’s been not quite enough thought - or perhaps it’s the wrong sort.  Despite the plethora of ideas, the show as a whole feels rather like a random assembly of them, the satire scattergun and the connection between Craig’s story and the songs is, well, tenuous.

As for the songs themselves, the program includes the ‘White Hat Hackers Songbook’ with the lyrics of the sixteen songs.  This proves necessary since the Hackers’ enunciation and singing skills are variable, and the lyrics themselves have a sort of stream of consciousness quality, the words themselves often ill-matched to or quarrelling with the music.  (But does one follow the lyrics in the half-light from the stage, or watch the performers?)  

What’s surprising is that Ella Filar is a talented musician who knows her cabaret styles.  C.f. Briand, Valentin, Brecht, Jacques Brel, et al., whose work, even in translation, has a crisp clarity. I last heard her music and lyrics in this same venue for Christine Croyden’s marvellous The World Without Birds: A Musical Fable and praised them highly.  Here, perhaps, the freedom not to fit with someone else’s concept has allowed an outburst of creativity that needed a focus.

Michael Brindley

Image by Miranda Troynar