Jake Mace
A social media behemoth. 2 content moderators. Their new billionaire boss. Moon Loaf are offering up their spin on satirical comedy taking a nosedive into the world of misinformation, technology, responsibility, power, and what they call ‘eating other people’s sins’. With such an intriguing premise, we wanted to get to know more about Insult to Injury, currently playing at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in London, so we could get behind the binary code that makes up the show.
We sat down for an aptly pixelated pint with Grace Millie and Kieran Dee, the show’s co-creators, to find out more.
Catch Insult to Injury at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre until April 13th at 7:30pm. Tickets are available via the venue’s online Box Office.
Jake: Hi Grace and Kieran! Your new show is about two content moderators at a social media company meeting their new billionaire boss. Tell us about the inspiration and how it was working with such a prescient topic.
G & K: Hi Jake! Thanks for having us! It’s both a joy and a challenge to work on something so current. There’s a lot to absorb and inspire, but it’s an ever changing landscape. There are a few billionaire bosses out there right now, and more than one of them have a grubby hand in social media. We aren’t basing our story on one of these strange men, but rather an amalgamation of them. They are so awkward and odd and then also genuinely very scary, which is such great combination of things to stage. Marrying all of that into one hour long show is a hard task but we’re loving doing it.
Jake: You’re billing the show as a satirical comedy about misinformation, responsibility, power, and ‘eating other people’s sins’. What does ‘eating other people’s sins’ mean to you both, and how does it link to misinformation and your other themes?
If you’ll forgive a small history lecture…appearing as far back as the 17th century, sin eaters were called in to relieve the deceased of any sins they might be carrying with them into death. Bread placed on the chest of the laid-out body sucked up the sins of the dead, clearing them for passage to heaven… this concludes our lecture. There are now content moderators working in social media companies who refer to themselves as ‘sin eaters’ and we want to tell their stories. To show the burden of responsibility that rests on their shoulders and what the modern day bread is. This small group of people whose job it is to decide what’s right and wrong, true or false, a misjudged joke or genuine hate speech.
Jake: Can you tell us a little more about the process of developing the characters in the show? Did you have any inspiration and what kinds of research & development did you do?
G & K: We’ve spoken to some content moderators about their day to day and learned some fascinating and haunting things. The things a moderator has to consider are such huge concepts and they have to apply them to posts with a just few sentences and maybe a poo emoji. Often they have to have a sense of humour about the things they’re dealing with and we’ve tried to relay that humour in our show. We love incredibly busy political comedies like The Thick of It and that’s definitely been an inspiration to us. If we can successfully skewer the chaos surrounding these tech giants and the power they wield then we’ll be very happy indeed.
Jake: The show is debuting at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre – tell us about your journey getting the show there and how excited you are to be performing there.
G & K: It’s our longest run yet at a theatre we essentially haunt. This is our fourth play debuting there. This show has been bouncing around our brains and chatted about in pub corners for a very long time. We started working on it last year and we’re excited to be telling people a (hopefully) fascinating story.
Jake: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?
G & K: Hmmm…we think it’d have to be Prime. With some super expensive single malt whiskey in it. Social media frenzy meets wealthy man sat swilling in an armchair. The result is disgusting.
Phoebe Bakker
