User Not Found

Dante or Die, Chris Goode

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781786825315
• eBook ISBN: 9781786825322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

It's the moment of your death.

There's a magic button.

Do you delete your entire online legacy?

Or do you keep it – and leave the choice for someone else? 

USER NOT FOUND is about our digital lives after we die. Dante or Die's play, created with pioneering theatre-artist Chris Goode, is inspired by a Guardian article by Caroline Twigg about dealing with her late husband's digital afterlife. In the play Terry becomes responsible for the online legacy of his partner - he is flooded with condolence texts and messages about his partner's death, and then has to decide what to keep and what to delete. 

The performance was originally developed with creative technologists Marmelo, and was performed in a café, where the audience share Terry's story through smartphones and headphones. In this format the play was performed in cafés across the country, including at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe.   

The audience become a fly-on-the-wall to peer into the life of a man who is faced with keeping or deleting. A story of contemporary grief unfolds through this intimate, funny performance that gently interrogates our need for connection. "With his tender script, [Goode] hands us each the weight of the internet and asks how we get closure in a world where nothing ever switches off." The Guardian.

SCENE 1

We are handed a pair of headphones and a smartphone.

We are all in a cafe together.

A comfortable mid-range cafe — not a chain, but not achingly hip either. They just make good coffee.

TERRY comes here a lot. In fact he’s here already, nursing a peppermint tea, but he doesn’t stand out and at first we might not know who he is.

At a signal, we all put on our headphones. The sound in our ears of a subtly different cafe — more bustling, more detailed, and not quite ‘here’. It includes a Norah Jones song in the distance.

A bed of ambient music bleeds in to the sound feed.

And then we hear TERRY’s voice, though we still can’t necessarily pick him out. Throughout the performance TERRY moves around the café, sits at different tables, stands on chairs and tables at specific moments.

TERRY:

Listen, I mean…

I mean I could be anybody.

I mean any of us could be anybody.

Don’t you think?

To everyone else in the cafe, I sort of am. Anybody.

You know, when you spend a lot of time on your own, you don’t always get a sense of how completely unspecial you are until you’re around other people. And then when they ignore you — not unkindly, I’m not saying that…

But that’s how you find out.

Hello. Hi. I’m just…

My name’s Terry.

Without making eye contact with anybody, TERRY raises his hand.

This is me. Sort of as close as anyone can get to not even being just anybody but actually being nobody.

I’m not nobody, I know, but I’m sort of nobody in particular.

I’m just a guy in a cafe.

TERRY turns on his phone. All of the audience’s phones vibrate as they turn on in sync. We see the boot up screen. When the lock screen appears it displays today’s date and the time right now.

I suppose it depends on who else is looking. If they’re looking at me the way I look at… others.

Is anybody actually…? Are you, for that matter? Looking?

Take a look around.

Who do you see?

Easy one first. Margaret. I don’t know her name obviously but in my head she’s Margaret. Can you see her? If you look around you’ll see her. She blatantly looks like a Margaret. She’s like me. She likes to find a table out of the way, tucked in a corner. Margaret and me, we sit a little bit out of sight. Get on with our… stuff.

Not like Giancarlo. Thinks this place is his stage to walk out on. He’s a flirt. A pansexual flirt. I don’t think he’s ever had to pay for a shot of syrup in his life.

The retired couple, Dennis and Barbara. Sit in comfortable silence with two teas and two flapjacks. Maybe it isn’t comfortable. Maybe they’re screaming inside.

This is where we all come.

What did everyone do before every fourth store on the street was a cafe? Sit at home, I suppose. Suffer in silence. Now we come here and suffer to the greatest hits of Norah Jones. Joss Stone. Fake soul for an age of counterfeits.

I’ve learned to drown it out.

TERRY unlocks his phone, we see all his apps. He chooses the Relaxing Sounds App.

I have this app. I put on my headphones and listen to the sounds of a waterfall. It’s good. You can toggle the birds on and off depending on what you fancy.

He switches the waterfall on and then the bird sounds on then off then on again. The bird sounds continue to play over the top of the waterfall.

I get my regular peppermint tea and my regular bottle of water and my regular look of withering disdain from whichever barista, and I sit and listen to waterfalls and I write. Or I try to write. Or I wait to be able to write. Or I just wait.

And I look at all the other people who are waiting.

Maybe you. Maybe I’m watching you wait.

What are you waiting for, I wonder?

You:

TERRY starts to describes one person who is actually in the cafe as part of the audience — so the following text is indicative only:

Or you: cookie-cutter middle-aged guy in a check shirt and — let me guess — yep, Converse. Never got over the death of Kurt Cobain. Well why would you? You’re kind to your mother, lethal to houseplants. Stuck in a rented studio flat and trying to save up for something else except you keep coming here and ordering the most expensive bloody complicated coffee on the blackboard. Yeah I know you. I might even become you.

What’s coming down the track for you, dude?

We’re all in the cafe. The cafe that doubles as a metaphor. For… Life or something.

Here we are. That’s all. That’s what we do. We come here. To be together. Alone together. Every day. Not everybody every day. But people like us every day.

The date on the phone starts to move backwards quickly. It arrives at six weeks ago, 11:45am. The screensaver picture morphs from the sunrise to a picture of a shadow of a man as the clock settles on the date.

It’s going to be like this forever.

Except, wha...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Scene 1
• Scene 2
• Scene 3
• Scene 4
• Scene 5
• Scene 6
• Scene 7
• Scene 8
• Scene 9