Joe Spence stars as the eponymous AjaxRob Eager

Video game addiction isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind when you read Greek Tragedy. It probably shouldn’t be. If, like many a deservedly talented person in this or any university, you spent ten thousand hours honing your violin skills or learning to roll masterfully, your brain wouldn’t even try to make the connection. And you’d be better off. 

Having spent my own ten thousand hours getting to know various controllers, consoles, joysticks, and gamepads (a whole one thousand hours total just on Pokemon), my psyche gradually developed into something only too eager to look for happy pixelated associations wherever it could, to the point of folly/embarrassment. The worst cases have involved trying to wall-run in a public place, shouting ‘Press B to wall-run’ in a public place, or a mixture of the two. Two weeks into Tragedy term this year, actually having done the reading for that week’s monster of an essay, a few scrawled thoughts on the back of a library receipt ended up making the blueprint for Ajax440, my retelling of Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy ‘Ajax’, which has somehow survived across too-many-a-draft to the stage of the Corpus Playroom.

What struck me about ‘Ajax’, a play written back in 440BC, was how relevant it could still be. A man ruined by his own arrogance. Turned insane and found killing cattle in a field instead of slaying his enemies. His dreams only fulfilled in his tortured, virtual little world. It just made me think there should still be something in this story. And why not tell that story in a way that relates more to how most of us live now? Staring at tiny, glowing screens? It was only when I had an academic institution insisting on its importance that I got to grips with the Greeks, and almost the last thing I expected to find amongst the halls of classical literature were signs of innovation. Of modernisation. When Greek theatre consisted of old stories, old myths, and old gods, shown in new lights, given different motivations and different lives. Some myths were retold repeatedly over only a few years, endlessly renewed like a James Bond origin story. When I was a teenager my second obsession was reading, and there was always a place for the old mythologies in their new shiny covers and New York settings and snarky sidesicks, displaced so that my modern mind could pay attention to the stories without having to work out an alien geography or century.

Henry St Leger-Davey has had the unusual task of bringing a video game to the stageRob Eager

And somehow I came across a way to talk about my own relationship with gaming – an art form with its own beautiful stories, myths, designs, and characters – while adapting a story nearly two-and-a-half thousand years old that again had been an adaptation of a previous tale. Turning a Greek warrior into an introverted gamer with an Xbox, Youtube channel, and serious mother issues, seems alternatively batshit crazy and the most natural, fitting thing I could have done with the story. A story that hopefully will reach people in a more direct way than a classical play that fewer people in each generation are probably going to read. A story that can be about Call of Duty, Angry Birds, Youtube, cosplayers, or the rife sexism in the gaming community, while still being about what the story’s always been about: someone suffering, when reality shows them just how unhappy they really are.

Not to try to use the word ‘addiction’ lightly – there are probably worse, more crippling, painful, miserable addictions than staring at tiny glowing screens for extended periods. Nothing says first world problems quite like buying a £200 console and complaining about its control over you. But the damage is there. Only a few days ago, a man died in an internet cafe in Taiwan after playing online games for three days straight. Noone even noticed at first, as they were used to him showing up for days at a time and falling sleep in front of the screen. In a society where we have little-to-no danger of being mauled apart by natural predators, the greater dangers for us might well be coming from the safe little spaces we’ve made for ourselves. I needed a chiropractor called in for the damage I’d done to my spine just from hunching over the sofa seat for the previous decade.

And psychologically, introversion was a sure thing when a failing social life ‘out there’ didn’t match up to a digital fantasy where everything could go right, you could fulfil every goal set to you, and even the difficulty you faced was adjustable. It’s a dangerous comfort that just becomes more enticing as it gives you validation you’re not getting elsewhere. I don’t remember the day I started to turn against it, but by the time I was 18 I had definitely seen I had to choose one world over an another, and thankfully chosen the bigger one. Thank God, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t be here, putting on the play at all. I think that’s what Ajax really meant to me; I think he made the other choice, going for the honour of his dreams and away from the tragic life he’d actually lived, and I didn’t altogether blame him.

Just getting to explore all of those thoughts onstage has been more fulfilling than I could have predicted. Though I can’t predict how crazy it’s going to be. It’s a video-game onstage, for God's sake. We’ve had to create whole consistent costume styles, world designs, and character models for the ‘game’, finding ways to clash Hellenic beauty with the digital designs – and spent far too many hours choreographing Street Fighter combat for half the gaming scenes. How the hell do you stage that?

Ajax440 is showing at the Corpus Playroom, Tues – Sat 27th-31st January, 7pm.