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ELLEN SPOLSKY, Sent Away from the Garden? The Pastoral Logic of Tasso, Marvell, and Haley

can be an escape from law. The green world and the temptation to es-
cape to it is now provided by advances in the electronic technology of
internet interface, and in concert with the creative work of playwriting,
together offer a designer environment through which unrestrained
pleasure is available. As the curtain rises, there is nothing green in
sight; nothing even hinting of a pastoral. The scene is an institutionally
dull interrogation room in a police station. Two characters sit opposite
each other at a small table, equally and entirely uncolorful, evoking
the familiar genre of the police procedural. The two figures are Sims,
“a successful businessman,” and Morris, “a young female detective.”
The stage backdrop is covered with black and white computer code.
Sims, it soon appears, leads two lives. The one being investigated by
the detective is the businessman who has built an internet site called
“The Hideaway,” an alternative reality offering sexual pleasure, at a
date somewhere in the near future. The web, now called the Nether,
has grown in realism, power, and influence so that it is equivalent to
the world in which the theater audience lives. As we later learn, people
can travel between the two or even choose to live entirely in the
Nether. Although the opening scene might suggest an investigation
of white collar crime, Morris tells Sims that the charges against him
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are “Solicitation. Rape. Sodomy. Murder.” His defense is that the ac-
tivity at The Hideaway, for all that the technology makes it seem real,
is not embodied, not real. There cannot be any actual damage, only
pleasure. All the horrid crimes she names are illusions, and the young
children who seem to be abused reappear instantly, still smiling.
The question that interests Haley about The Hideaway is what
happens to the people who log into it. No one arrests children or adults
for killing character icons in video games in 2017. But technology, by the
time of the play, has vastly improved the pretense. A third character, an
undercover agent sent by Morris to infiltrate the site and investigate
Sims’ alleged crimes, was (re)created “from a set of prescribed ‘looks’”
(13). Before he was sent to the Hideaway he had to “pass a draconian
manners tutorial” (13) to purge his speech and body language of twen-

15 Jennifer Hayley, The Nether (London: Faber and Faber, 2014), 12. All further
page references are in the text.

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