TURN YOUR F***ING PHONES OFF

Join multi-award-winning theatre maker Hannah Maxwell for a sharing of her new show, TURN YOUR F***ING PHONES OFF. A dark, absurd and fiercely hopeful exploration of human connection in the Information Age.

TURN YOUR F***ING PHONES OFF tells the story of how we got here – you, Maxwell and everyone else. It playfully expounds on the rise of Big Tech, attention-hacking innovations and surveillance capitalism. It recounts Maxwell’s personal struggles with phone addiction, her bid for a life in analogue, and her bizarre chapter countering Kremlin-backed disinformation (cue Bond theme). And it sits you down on a train. The one you take all the time.

Performed in traverse with an immersive technical design by Benji Huntrods, TURN YOUR F***ING PHONES OFF has been dramaturgically supported by a stellar cadre of theatre-makers, including Ursula Martinez, Rachel Mars, Annie Siddons and Nick Cassenbaum.

Hi.

Thanks for making time for whatever this is.

I suppose it’s a theatre show.

Perhaps it’s an interdisciplinary, interactive, mixed-media piece of performance art.

A town hall meeting at the end of the world.

A karaoke booth in a nuclear bunker.

A clear-the-air chat

between you,

me

and the rest of our plane-of-existence-mates.

A thrilling and vital new work from one of the UK’s most exciting writer-performers, as voted for by audiences at last year’s BABYFLEAREINDEERBAG (“delightfully meta” ★★★★ The Guardian).

This production has been commissioned by Waterside Arts, Sale and developed through generous funding from Arts Council England. The project has been supported by The Vaults, Queen Mary University of London and The Front Room, Weston-super-Mare.