Turn Your F*cking Phones Off

An old school payphone is spotlit centre stage. As a woman in her thirties, Hannah Maxwell has grown up with her mobile phone in her hand. And as an actor, she’s all too familiar with the vast potential for days doomscrolling between jobs. She’s dimly aware of the physical and emotional ravages of all this screen time. But it’s only when she takes a job that sees her plunge wholesale into the murky mis- and disinformation soup, that the scale and myriad manifestations of the harm done by phones really becomes clear.

Turn Your F*cking Phones Off is a compelling reflection on the addictive appeal of mobile phones. Maxwell mixes dialogue, narration, documentary-worthy fact finding and frank regret for her own wasted time with captions demarcating scenes alongside an eclectic array of inane and then alarmingly apocalyptic film footage (Benji Huntrods). The script’s construct artfully embodies our wrecked attention spans as we hunt the next dopamine hit. And her frantic, funny delivery is wholly endearing.

It would be easy to make this show into a rant but Maxwell’s cleverness is unfurling her personal realisation about the extent of the murk alongside some stellar fact finding including a side shuffle into an exploration of the growing influence of tech company Palantir. It’s not interactive and yet it’s interactive lite – you’ll find yourself singing karaoke, passing the parcel, playing with a beach ball. All hearty wholesome tasks that demand a focus on the moment rather than reaching for the phone that’s never too far from your hand.