Almost 35% of young people voted “YouTuber” as their number one career choice in 2018, a startling amount of people – particularly when you think that many people reading this review may not realise that this is even a serious career choice. The reality is that some people have become multi-millionaires as “YouTubers”. Claire Gaydon’s “See-Through” examines an example of one of those young people trying to make it in this field – Vlogging as it is known – with a story that is based on true events.
The Camden People’s Theatre in London is a typical fringe theatre set up, the stage set up at the front and some free standing chairs laid out for the audience. As we arrived into the theatre the stage was already set with our character, Claire, sat on a chair in front of her laptop with her back to the audience and an image of her screen being projected onto the wall in front of us.
“See-Through” is a documentary comedy / drama that walks us through the attempts of Claire to become a famous Vlogger. This started with some rather cringeworthy videos that she created as live theatre with the audience, just giving us a feel for how difficult this process is. Many of the embarrassing moments in the video were very funny, creating much laughter around me in the audience. Simple things like practicing how she says hello to her future fans and how her nervous attempts to include humour were funny simply because they were cringeworthy.
The story of Claire Gaydon drifts along as her videos become a little more professional as she involves family and friends completing challenges or answering questions. She even gets to the point where she sings her own theme tune to the opening of each video, backed by one of her friends playing the piano. However, there is a problem as her videos are only getting a small number of views so she starts to research how she can improve her subscribers – something she researches using Google while the audience watch on. The simple answer is to make the subject matter far more shocking and therefore more viewable.
Her next set of videos are much less family friendly and consist of subjects such as “smoking weed and having sex”, two subjects that she proudly declares that she has a lot of knowledge about. This was merely the start as she became more and more daring with the subjects she Vlogged about – needless to say her mother didn’t appear in any of those videos. Ultimately this leads to significantly more subscribers but also leads into the dramatic finale which leads her into a confession to her mum about why she no longer went to church on Sundays.
Ultimately “See-Through” is a very cleverly written documentary. There are elements of edited video, live unedited video, interaction with the audience and elements of reality. It is very hard not to connect with Claire Gaydon as she manages to hold the balance between a parody of a young “YouTuber” and her own experiences growing up, her relationship with her mother and the general feeling that she just wants to be liked. There is comedy, there is emotion and there is definitely drama. Whilst the vast majority of the audience were millennials and clearly this is a show that appeals to that age group, as a 40-something I did not feel alienated by the content and at no point did she use language that is not universally understood. This show works on many levels.
Reviewer - John Fish
on - 23/4/19
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