Catch

De Angelis, April, Stella Feehily, Tanika Gupta, Chloe Moss and Laura Wade. Catch. London: Royal Court/Oberon Books, 2006. Print.

Catch is a really intriguing, gripping play. I’d like to see it staged alongside Caryl Churchill’s A Number (which I haven’t blogged - I read it very early on in the comps process) as part of a festival of plays dealing with the possible near-future consequences/employments of new technologies. Whereas A Number deals with what reproductive technologies, namely cloning, mean for identity, Catch deals with what surveillance technologies like CCTV could develop into, and what it would mean for identity.

The protagonist of Catch is Claire Munonyedi, who is an “identity actualizer” (38). She runs an office that helps people re-establish their identity after they experience identity theft (and police refer clients to her for this purpose) or, alternately, to help people change their identity to one which would allow them to move up in the world (23, 54).

As we find out from Claire’s work-experience placement student, Maya, in this near-future London, biopolitics is on the verge of becoming more efficient. The government has just passed a new “identity card bill.” This bill gives everyone a multi-purpose identity card––kind of like the multipass in The Fifth Element––which will be connected to a centralized database (The National Identity Registry) which will keep track of detailed information about everybody. As Maya explains:

“We’ll all have our own unique number, our fingerprints, a scan at the back of our eye and our photo––name, address and date of birth as well. They’ll add on stuff about our religion, residence status and lots of private things about us... So if you go to the bank, the building society, the post office, the chemists, they’ll all have NIR terminals where they can swipe your card which means that there’s a record of where you used your card every time. Yeah? And then private businesses are gonna be given access to the NIR database thingy” (37).

What Maya describes is basically an air-tight system of surveillance, which leaves people vulnerable to everyone from government influence to marketing companies to abusive spouses (38). Furthermore, the NIR has been implemented as part of a theatre of security, as it claims it will keep terrorists out of the country, as well as controlling the ability of certain British citizens to leave the country should they not comply with government measures such as finger printing and retinal scans (38).

Catch suggests, however, that these measures of surveillance are not really affective for security purposes. In a side plot, we get to know four young people, who either live on the street or are very low income, but who use cell phones to record video of themselves committing violent crimes such as mugging, assault and murder and humiliation right in front of CCTV cameras, which may or may not be recording (47, 67, 68). As Claire muses,

“The public are no longer fazed by surveillance. But a pattern is beginning to emerge––that of young people creating an image, an identity, through this medium. Having grown up with the furniture of surveillance, there is a section of teens behaving in ways because they are observed and not the contrary” (51).

The cameras, then, instead of hailing people as law-abiding citizens are getting exactly what they expect: indiscriminate, violent crime, and identities based around this crime, this idea of watching and being watched.

Maya speaks in the simple future tense, indicating that the NIR database has not yet been fully implemented; Claire’s knowledge of people’s identities, including their most minute of habits and actions from what cigarette brand they smoke, to what bill payments they’ve defaulted, indicates, however, that such a database already exists. Whether she has created this database herself based on the information she gathers from her clients (including, presumably, social insurance and credit card information) or whether she is accessing the NIR is not entirely clear. I think, perhaps, the suggestion is that all the information about you that would be in a database like the NIR is already out there in digital space, and can be accessed relatively easily. This ease of access is certainly reinforced by Maya’s hacking into Claire’s database because Claire’s “security’s shit” (79). It’s also reinforced by the private detective, Dean, finding Claire, who, as it turns out, has herself left another identity behind.

This is a play that suggests to us that we no longer have privacy, and that the systems which invade our privacy, supposedly in order to keep us safe, actually put us in further danger. It also suggests that people can resist their identity being fixed in particular ways, and that rather than taking our identity away from us, surveillance can allow us venues through which to build new identities. Claire tries, for example, to help Carol, a single mother, change her identity category so that her credit rating will improve and she will face less financial and employment discrimination. As Claire explains, Carol can change her category simply by moving from council housing (subsidized) to a rented place (56). Claire wants to help people work within the system.

Carol protests, however, that where she lives and what products she buys do not make up her identity alone. As she puts it, “but none of it adds up to who I am” (56). Similarly, Maya becomes disenchanted with Claire’s identity actualizing, arguing that her database is “not a fucking oracle” (79). She argues that “even if you had the details of every single person on the planet, it wouldn’t tell you who they are” (79). Carol and Maya’s protests hold faith in the idea that identity is something essential beyond what we do, or what we buy or with whom we associate, or how we subvert or comply with the system. Furthermore, Although Claire tries to subvert the system on a more macro level, the street kids’ violent acts also snub surveillance, as do everyday consumers, who, for example, swipe baby nappies, with the help of willfully ignorant Tesco cashiers (40-1). What does it say for identity if we steal, rather than buy the products (or ideologies?) that shape us in various databases? Are these acts of theft any different from Claire’s possibly incautious altering of identity? Does Claire being found suggest that her mission to change identity completely is impossible, because she is still essentially shaped by her past?