Review: Guidelines at New Diorama Theatre ★★★★½
A sizzling and scary take on social media philosophy, exploring vital questions about our age that no one seems to have time for. CONGLOMERATE are ones to watch.
Image: Clémence Rebourg @clemtofame
★★★★½ Guidelines | Until 14 February 2026
Fresh new writing from Pip Williams takes us on a creepy journey into the dark woods of social media and our own obsessions. Eschewing linear narrative, this decidedly avant-garde yet unboring (yes, this is possible!) show keeps you guessing with some mind-melting central imagery, including a genetically different frog with eyes in its mouth.
Rachel-Leah Hosker and Alex McCauley are outstanding in this two-hander, weaving intense physicality with often long passages of Williams’ biting text, delivering real passion and performance excellence. Under James Nash’s direction, yet with few staging bells & whistles, they evoke an environment similar to the intense melodramatic televisual worlds of Stranger Things, Twin Peaks and The Handmaid’s Tale. From Hosker’s elastic face to McCauley’s dance and movement skills, these two supremely impressive actors show that they may just be the next big things in performance. The intensity of their on-stage relationship is reminiscent of Natalie Press and Emily Blunt in Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2004 film My Summer of Love. Hopefully we’ll be seeing Hosker and McCauley on our screens soon, too.
Guidelines – the debut production from Williams & Nash’s artistic partnership CONGLOMERATE – is a show about technology’s dark underbelly, but does not rely on technology in its storytelling except for an impressive soundscape from Patch Middleton. There’s no projection, minimal set and an impressive use of darkness which combine to conjure a nightmarish world where the work of the characters and fractured narrative burrow deep into the minds of the audience.
There is a dark foreboding built up to almost The Woman in Black-levels of anticipated terror, but Guidelines stops short of delivering a horrific crescendo. In choosing to swerve the unrelenting exposure that it is critiquing, Guidelines manages to inspire prickly, sickening dread whilst also refusing to give in to the temptation of gratuitous thrills.
Who is to blame for the damage that the dark side of social media and technology dependence can do to vulnerable people young or old? Who is responsible for protecting against those dangers? Is curiosity to see everything, to have all information at our fingertips, a natural state or an unhealthy addiction? And how complicit are we all in the horrors that dwell in the darkest corners of the digital world? Guidelines asks the questions, and doesn’t promise to have the answers – instead, this is a piece of theatre which provokes further thought.
New Diorama Theatre are onto a winner with this one – and Guidelines deserves a future life to spread its provocative tale of social media dystopia to people who need to hear its malevolent prophecy.
I am Joint Editor at To Do List. I like free, cheap & offbeat London, especially: cabaret, art, theatre, pop-ups, eating out, quirky films, museums, day trips, social enterprise & much more.
