Seen at Edinburgh Festival Fringe on the 10^th of August 2023

5 stars – the necessary answer to a silent question

Two friends have quitted their previous jobs as content moderators for social media companies. They meet again after long when one of them receives a visit from her former colleague. He wants to sue the company for the damages on his mental health.

Moderation is the first show produced on this theme, at least that I am aware of. It points out how these jobs consist in a new form of work alienation, which is not recognised as such and does not compensate the workers for the damage it causes. In the bigger picture, it is exemplar of a certain type of ‘new’ corporate jobs that take advantage of the temporary lack of regulations to monetise at the most and discharge responsibilities.

In content moderation, cohorts of mostly young people are hired to watch videos or other content before it goes online. A portion of it contains distressing content and often causes trauma.

The two protagonists have been impacted in different ways. The character interpreted by Ellen Trevaskiss has become asocial and has developed some manias, while her friend, Michael Gillett, suffers from memory loss and has to ask her for information to reconstruct how it was like to work there. The two actors are nothing less than brilliant in their roles, and their naturalistic performance is so intense that attention cannot drift away from the action.

The text by award-winner Rebekah King manages the hard role to balance tragic moments with lighter ones to relief tension. The engaged text thus results in an engaging narrative, made even more precious by Ben Fleming and Ben Newman’s direction, that combines a perfect use of the space, an interesting colour palette and accurate choices in movement direction.

Tickets and Info: https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/moderation