Always Alone Together
A show about hackers, phreaks and the secret history of the digital world.
Debuted at part of the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2014, it was revived at the Galway Theatre Festival and the Dublin Theatre Festival Tent at Electric Picnic in 2016. A one-man storytelling documentary about hacking, it's the first part of a multi-part project about the cultural history of the internet called Enquire Within Upon Everything.
Here's what we said about it:
“Tells us the meaning of what it is to truly connect to others… beautiful and enlightening” – LeCool Dublin
How much to you really know about the Internet?In 1968 a Florida teenager is making free calls by whistling into the telephone. In 2008 a video of Tom Cruise turns a bunch of online pranksters into a global protest movement. In between, the Internet was born.
In a thrilling feat of solo storytelling, writer-performer Cathal McGuire draws these disparate threads together into a sweeping, cinematic narrative of friendship, betrayal and the search for belonging. And what’s more: it’s all true.
Always Alone Together is an epic, intimate one-man documentary about the hackers and phone phreaks who shaped the digital world. By turns hilarious, suspenseful and deeply moving, spanning multiple decades and several continents, it will change how you think about the Internet forever.
Created and performed by Cathal McGuire
Dramaturgy by Dee Burke, Áine Ní Laoghaire and Dan Colley
Welcome To The Memory Palace
A stealth musical about the nature of the Internet.
Our new show, currently in development.
"This is the beginning of forever and ever." – Portishead, Glory Box
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." – Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
"Memories are made of this." – Gilkyson/Dehr/Miller, Memories Are Made Of This
The Memory Palace is a museum of everything that has ever happened. Each room contains an object, each object has a story. The second part of Enquire Within Upon Everything, a multi-part project about the cultural history of the Internet, it's a stand-alone musical documentary about the nature of the World Wide Web and its implications for our daily lives.
Inspired by museum audio tours, Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, James Gleick’s The Information, WNYC’s Radiolab, the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects, Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense, and the children’s TV series Knightmare, the show is fundamentally an exploration of how small, simple things like ones and zeroes, neurons, and notes can combine to form big, complicated things like the Internet, consciousness, and music.
A video of the work in progress version of Welcome To The Memory Palace.
A bit about Cathal
Game Theory's artistic director Cathal McGuire
I'm a Dublin-based theatre maker, dramaturg, facilitator, creative producer and creativity skills coach. That sounds like a lot of different things, but really it's one thing: working with people to make stuff. Mostly I make shows, sometimes with professional actors, sometimes with young people .
I started out as an actor and playwright – I directed my own plays Mule, Short Lives and The King Sweeney before changing up how I made work. I began to focus more on devised and documentary performance, which is what led to making and performing Always Alone Together, and planning a cycle of works about the Internet, Enquire Within Upon Everything.
Level Up: Actor Training
Object & Story Theatre Workshops
Pavilion Theatre Residency 2019
