Strap yourself in for a wild ride and prepare to have your synapses blown. Charlotte Otton is a force to be reckoned with and, boy, does she have something to say. In her “I’m soooooo topical” one-woman show, I Watched Someone Die on TikTok, she uses her considerable intelligence, charisma and sense of humour to dissect the horrific impact social media has on young minds and the addictive, insidious machinations of social media algorithms that exploit our vulnerabilities and darker proclivities to keep us hooked.
Otton’s set is a bare stage with a giant screen on the back wall, which hits us with a montage of disturbing TikTok videos at the beginning of the show. Car crashes merge with dance moves and digital suicide notes, distress calls merge with emergency services, and wonky camera footage of carnage and trauma. Otton simulates a ‘doomscroll’ so disturbing it made me physically ill.
She breaks the grim mood b singing a chirpy, happy song before plunging us into the horror of the online world again. She recreates an online scene of seduction between herself and an older man that occurred in the early days of her internet experimentation. She sends him a nude picture of herself, and a masturbatory dialogue ensues. It’s all pretty hilarious … until we learn that she was only 12 years old. Pictures of her teenage self ping on the screen, and we realise with horror that the innocence of our young has been severely compromised.
She snaps us out of the horror with more dark humour before plunging us into the quagmire again. This time, she acts out a 911 call she found on TikTok. It’s a woman with a deep Southern accent claiming to have killed her children. Only one child is left and wants to be saved. Charlotte performs it for laughs, but of course, the laughs are hollow and underlined with a deadly sense of dread. This is the real world and we’ve become desensitised to it.
The catalytic moment for the creation of the show occurred not long after Otton had relocated to Sydney. She was lonely, isolated and spiralling into depression, which she hoped to alleviate by signing up for some cheerful TikTok videos. Instead, she says, “My always learning algorithm picked up on my depression: drip-feeding it back to me digitally, forcing me to micro-dose alarming content centred mostly on death.” This intensified her depression, eventually leading her to break down in floods of tears when she witnessed the death of a five-year-old while scrolling TikTok on the train one morning. Soon after, she felt compelled to make a show about the dark side of social media.
Otton developed the work by interrogating her own algorithm and did a lot of online deep diving and writing to get to the crux of what she wanted to say. She developed the work with the help of director Maddie Diggins, collaborator Lindsay McDonald, dramaturg Harriet Gillies and composer Solomon Frank during residencies at Sydney’s Performance Space and Brand X’s Flying Nun program. After a sold-out season in Melbourne, it’s now playing in Perth.
Judging by the screams of laughter (and my visceral sense of horror), I suspect she’ll be in the running for a bunch of awards at Fringe this year. (Last year her show Feminah took out five Fringe awards and a PAWA award for Best Actor). This is high-impact theatre, in equal turns hilarious and horrifying, and it has a host of important things to say.
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok is a dark comedy about the impact of social media, online content consumption and the desensitisation to violence in the digital age. It also delves into the overwhelming nature of the internet and the algorithms that control what we see.
But Otton’s show is more than just a commentary; it’s a wake-up call. It brings home the dangers of the internet and social media with visceral force. It’s made me want to flee to the country and live off-grid in order to escape the hideous and insidious impact of this ever-evolving technological age.
Read: Performance review: Evolution Revolution, State Theatre Centre of WA
Perhaps that’s the ultimate message: we need to reclaim our lives from the clutches of the digital world before it’s too late. Props to Otton and team for delivering such an important message with this unique, innovative, hilarious and disturbing production.
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok
State Theatre Centre of WA
Presented by Charlotte Otton and Lazy Yarns
Tickets: $15-$25
I Watched Someone Die on TikTok will be performed until 25 January 2025 as part of FRINGE WORLD.
