Written by Alfie Jones

Directed by Alice Harding

Review by Orly Benn

Underbelly George Square – Buttercup

In a visual age of mass media consumption and production, Alfie Jones’s ‘This Blighted Star’ is immeasurably pertinent as a modern analysis of surveillance, mass media safety, social conspiracy, and celebrity idolatry. Jones’s play, expertly directed by Alice Harding, follows a surveillance officer under investigation for breaking GDPR after being caught prolifically watching an old friend before his disappearance and (later discovered) death.

Jones’s performance is remarkably self-assured and thoughtful, maintaining eerie control as the character veers further into obsession, even if the narrative’s chronology is sometimes ambiguous, and the venue of Underbelly’s Buttercup ascends into sweat-box territory. As a narrative told entirely through its address to the audience, Jones’s delivery cleverly veers away from the all-too-familiar ‘storytelling’ tone typical of one-man Fringe debuts and leans into anxious confession, achieving the famous challenge of making the anti-hero a sympathetic figure.

Harding’s direction, along with the beautifully minimal yet productive designs by Angelo Sagnelli and Theo Vasiloudes, masterfully intensifies the disquieting evocations of Jones’s disciplined performance, manipulating a layered crucible of surveillance; a one-man show is of course just as absorbed with an audience watching its primary actor as much as it is about their character watching the world through the modern surveillance that mediates it (in this case, a projector-screen that obsessively loops the final captured moments of the deceased in CCTV footage).

The limited space of the Buttercup almost works to Jones’s advantage as a credit to both Jones and Harding’s considerations. Its blackout, low-ceilinged, un-air-conditioned confinement renders the audience complicit in a trend of intensive watchfulness that is conducive to the obsessive nature by which surveillance officers watch their screens, the bereft grieve their lost, and modern media makes public celebrity of private affairs. This Blighted Star is an incredibly promising debut, and a refreshing, tense interrogation into how modern visual frenzies, in more ways than one, license the encroachment of mass surveillance and obsessive culture into private spheres, masking as ‘a helping hand’.

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