The Believers Are But Brothers
★★★★
RECENT events in Charlottesville and Barcelona render Javaad Alipoor’s multi-layered piece 60 of the most essential minutes of the Fringe. Associate director at Bradford’s Theatre in the Mill and Sheffield Theatre, much of Alipoor’s work is the result of discussions and workshops with communities which don’t usually engage with mainstream theatre. Seeing this show just a couple of hours before a van was driven through La Rambla in Barcelona, killing 13 people and injuring at least 100, you can only hope this is the beginning of a much larger project of engagement and discussion.
The Believers Are But Brothers is the product of hours spent in the online world of fantasists, spies and extremists, including recruiters for Daesh (Islamic State). Featuring the stories of three young men, it draws parallels between those drawn towards Islamist terrorism and the so-called “alt-right”, a vast, amorphous subculture of coders and creatives, trickster trolls, men’s rights activists, pick-up artists and white supremacist fascists.
Part talk, part play, the piece includes a participatory element where Alipoor and the audience communicate through WhatsApp, the instant messaging smartphone app which uses end-to-end encryption, meaning only the communicating users can read the messages. It’s very similar to Telegram, the app heavily criticised for its use by Daesh, and neither are liked by governments or the security services. That online world, he says, “is only ever two clicks away”. Though Alipoor either sits by a laptop or stands in front of a screen showing images and footage – including that showing hooded Daesh captives reading statements and alt-right glamour boy Milo Yiannopoulos being greeted with Nazi salutes – we never visit the sites most associated with either, as that would likely take us outside the limits of the law.
It would certainly take us to some very disturbing places. Just as Daesh release gory execution videos, the Random or /b/ board of imageboard site 4chan can be a particularly repulsive place to be. Described by one writer as “lunatic, juvenile ... brilliant, ridiculous and alarming” 4chan – one of the internet’s most trafficked sites – has a double life as being a forum for both creativity and depravity. Many elements of internet culture were born or popularised here such as lolcats, the most common meme form as a macro image, and the use of Pepe the Frog as a signifier for chaos and the alt-right. Alipoor devotes a significant part of the show to the origins and use of Pepe, which is both fascinating and serves to illustrate the huge scale of the writer-director’s undertaking here. There are a whole series of shows which could have been made about “men, the internet and violence” and whole books written about the influence of 4chan on culture and politics – a notable recent example being Whitney Phillips’ excellent This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.
That Alipoor has managed to distil some of the key ideas into just one hour is astonishing. That the ostensible drama of the three young men gets somewhat lost amid the piece doesn’t seem to matter; it’s the discussions and the play’s life after the Fringe as a potential tool for further engagement that’s at stake here. It’s also of key importance that, among the volleys of facts that Alipoor serves the audience is that, of the 1000 or so individuals known to authorities for Islamist extremism in the UK, none are known members of any activist organisations relating to Palestine or Syria. As Alipoor says: “Something is being born on these screens and I don’t know what to call it.” What also unites these groups, as well as the exclusion of women and a totalitarian worldview, is the influence of games such as Call of Duty, the gory powerplay of Game of Thrones, and now, after Charlottesville, the use of the vehicle as a deadly weapon.
“Where do we go from here?” Alipoor asks, as the audience is asked to share thoughts on WhatsApp. A message flashes up: “Groups have a way of working these things out.” It’s imperative we do.
Until Aug 26 (not 23), Summerhall, (V26), Edinburgh, 12.45pm, £12, £10 concs. Tel: 0131 226 0000. www.edfringe.com
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