REVIEW: Sluts With Consoles - Network Theatre, VAULT Festival

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Sluts with Consoles – Network Theatre, VAULT Festival
Lead Creatives: Alice Flynn and Alice Robb  
Reviewer: Emily Beech

I was nervous going into Sluts With Consoles, and I’ll explain why. I fulfil every stereotype of a somewhere-between-millennial-and-gen-z person born in the late 90s in literally every way except one: I am not a gamer. Not for lack of trying, but it was one of the few hard ‘no’s I was told as a child (although, weirdly, Sims 2 being the one exception) and I just never picked up the hobby as an adult. There was also the matter of it seeming more like a boy’s pastime, and something that was pretty heavily marketed away from my demographic.

I needn’t have worried. I am, as it turns out, the ideal audience member for Sluts With Consoles. This is not a show exclusively for gamers. The show opens with, and is accompanied by throughout, a video design replicating a game (‘Press X to Start’, etc) before the performers (and creators of Dogmouth Theatre, Alice Flynn and Alice Robb) enter as stock video game characters. The video as an on-stage language is one of the strongest elements of this show; it structures the piece by indicating the ‘levels’ of the story, it provides context (for those of us uninitiated) by looping clips of the games being referenced, and even plays a character itself by the end. It was a shame, then, that it was only displayed on a small TV screen to the far left of the stage and only clearly visible to some of the audience, when so much thought and craft had gone into this part of the show’s design.

But considering that this is Dogmouth Theatre’s first ever run of performances as a theatre company, the piece hangs together very well and my critiques are trivial. Sluts With Consoles is structured into ‘levels’, where one character (usually Robb) is ‘playing’ or at least enacting the experience of the game while the other (Flynn) comments on an adjacent chapter of childhood, or more accurately, girlhood. For anyone pretty video game-illiterate (like me), Robb’s character is the relatable protagonist. But she is also the more sympathetic character; she is the sparky newcomer to the gaming community, contrasted to Flynn’s role as the critical, embittered old-timer who had to earn her stripes as a woman in a male-dominated realm. The games referenced in each ‘level’ or chapter of growing up are all fairly entry-level and keep the show consistently accessible; if anything, it almost feels geared more towards those of us who are not avid gamers. Somewhere in the middle (specifically, the Slender Man section of the show), there is a sensitive honouring of those impacted by GamerGate - a harassment campaign against women in the video game industry in 2014. The show handles the seriousness of this subject matter with the same commitment that it brings to the comedic moments, without dropping in energy at all.

As you might expect, audience participation plays a role in Sluts With Consoles - who would go to a show about video games and not expect to play themselves? These moments had a mostly successful hit-rate, though it seemed a slight missed opportunity that on one of these occasions - where an audience member is asked to pick a name for each character - the outcome of this interaction is never readdressed, and the characters remain, for all intents and purposes, nameless.

Ultimately, Sluts With Consoles is an ambitious and impressive debut. This show is a commentary on internalised (and not so internalised) misogyny in the gaming community and industry, through the lens of a hobby that is so ubiquitous to our culture that even those of us not active in it can easily participate.