Jamie Sykes told David Hennessy about his new play heading to Edinburgh Fringe that tackles the toxic ‘incel’ culture.
Inspired by 2014’s ‘Gamergate’ scandal of a misogynistic online harassment campaign against feminism in video games and the Elliot Rogers attacks in California from the same year, The Last Incel is a dark satire that explores the toxic world of Incels – an online community of “involuntarily celibate” men who blame women and society for keeping sex from them – and what happens when their ideology and bond is challenged.
When one of the members of an Incel group chat admits he’s had a one-night stand with a journalist who later invades the group chat, some of the men are forced to question their beliefs, and the unthinkable idea that women might just be people after all creates havoc in their tight-knit cell.
Gamergate was a misogynistic online harassment campaign targeting women in the video games industry.
Incels have come into the news due to events like the Isla Vista attacks in 2014 when 22-year-old Elliot Rogers killed six people and wounded 14 more.
It was in 2021 in Plymouth that Josh Davison, another incel, shot and killed five people.
Playwright Jamie Sykes (33) from Dun Laoghaire approaches the subject through comedy and empathy not to legitimise the actions of characters like these but to also show the suffering and loneliness that has led them down such a dark path.
Jamie studied in Queen Mary University in London.
It was on his return to Dublin that Jamie got back into creating theatre.
Justine Stafford, Goblins Goblins Goblins, Jackson Ryan, Fiachra Corkery and Niall Johnson make up the cast of The Last Incel which has already had a sold out run at Smock Alley Theatre.
Where did the idea first come from?
“I just became more and more aware of incels, this toxic nerd culture, first through video games and this GamerGate stuff.
“I just was aware of them as a thing and thought it was funny.
“First I thought of the idea as a sketch, it would be funny if basically it’s a group defined by not having sex so if one of them had sex, he would get kicked out of the group, and that would be a funny sketch.
“But then the more I researched it, the more it was kind of sadder and darker than I kind of anticipated, and it developed more into a play.
“It just felt like there was a lot more meat there than I had anticipated.”
It’s toxic masculinity at its most extreme, isn’t it?
“Yeah, exactly. It’s a toxic masculinity but also a feeling of not being able to properly participate in toxic masculine culture so then they become this repressed little group that’s isolated.
“They think toxic masculinity is how you’re supposed to participate in society and then they feel like they can’t do it.
“Then they become these bitter, bitter people.”
That comes from their entitlement, doesn’t it? They’re entitled to women but can’t get them…
“It is, yeah. It’s entitlement but it’s also sex becoming this thing and pleasure with women becoming this thing that’s bigger than what it is, it’s almost like a symbol that represents their own injustice in life and being rejected by society and not fitting in.
“It becomes this totemic symbol of how they’ve been wronged.”
You have already played at Smock Alley, what were the reactions like?
“Reactions were very good.
“I personally was very nervous just because it’s such a dark subject.
“We’re trying to make it funny.
“It’s supposed to be a fun show almost, despite the dark subject matter.
“It’s supposed to be a satire.
“But the reaction was extremely positive.
“People got what we were trying to do and there was a good mixture of people who weren’t aware of incels and then people who were aware of incels.
“It was satisfying to see them represented and deconstructed onstage.”
It must be dark comedy, do people find themselves surprised that they’re laughing at such a subject?
“I think so, yeah.
“There’s definitely initially kind of a shock at the first material because we don’t pull any punches.
“We immediately are like, ‘This is the way these guys talk about women’.
“It’s not pleasant.
“It’s very ugly because we don’t really want to hide that.
“So I think initially there is a bit of a like, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’
“But then people do find themselves laughing.
“There’s a mixture of laughter like, ‘I can’t believe how horrible these guys are’.
“In some ways, the comedy is pretty approachable.”
Are there audible gasps?
“Yes, there is a lot of audible gasps especially when Justine is on there.
“They just say a lot of horrible things.
“It’s weird. It’s a gasp but there’s also definitely a great electricity in the room of like, ‘I can’t believe this is happening’.
“And then hopefully because of the way we engage with it, we’re not letting them get away with it too much.
“She kind of immediately goes after them all in turn.
“But yeah, there’s gasps and then there’s a few big laughs.”
There is five characters, is that right?
“Yeah, there’s four incels and then one of them gets invited to his brother’s stag.
“His mother makes his brother take him along and on the stag, he has this drunken hookup with this girl who, it turns out, is a journalist who then invades their Zoom meeting and kind of starts to make them question their beliefs and kind of holds them to the fire a little bit.
“The opening is three of the characters doing these monologues which is basically just a summation of the way they kind of talk on these forums and the kind of usual grievances and thoughts they kind of bring up when they want to say why they believe this and how the world has wronged them and stuff.
“And then she’s able to interrogate them, which helps bring up a lot of the thinking behind it.
“Then ultimately, she’s kind of able to help dismantle it a bit.
“There is dance in the show.
“The incels do dance.
“That’s part of where the comedy comes from, there’s five or six dance numbers and we’re kind of using movement to express their inner emotional turmoil and satirise it a little bit, that self-pity, that entitlement, expressing it through movement and the music, the song choices are kind of surprising pop choices that you probably wouldn’t traditionally associate with an incel to kind of provide a bit of ironic contrast, I guess.”
That makes sense as they look at it through a dark lens but are still in the same world as the rest of us.
Does that mean Justine doesn’t dance?
“She goes get involved in a couple of dance numbers actually.
“There’s one dance number which is actually not for comedy.
“It’s one of the more serious parts of the show where we learn more about her backstory.
“She had a younger brother who was not totally dissimilar from an incel, just that kind of lonely, isolated, young man.
“So part of the reason she’s able to stay in this toxic group is that they remind her a bit of her brother, and she has some affinity for them.
“It’s kind of her trying to work through her own past.
“Part of the crazy thing is they’re so horrible, any sane person would just get out of the situation immediately, but she stays in it.
“That’s part of the reason why.
“It’s a real swirl of comedy and actual sadness as well.”
You took a lot of inspiration from GamerGate back in 2014.
I hadn’t actually heard of it but I guess that shows what a whole bunch of people with too much time on their hands can do when they happen to be nerds but also misogynistic bullies.
“Yeah. it was crazy to see it.
“It was kind of like a turning point in nerd culture because up until that point, at least for me, it was like, ‘Oh, the nerds are like the outsiders. They’re like the nice people who’ve been bullied in school and can empathise’.
“And then it was like, ‘Oh no, there’s a subculture in this which is dark and they’ve been hurt and they want to hurt other people back’.
“And they’re, like you said, entitled and misogynistic.
“And also, their whole rallying call in that was like, ‘It’s about ethics in video game journalism’: For that to be the hill you want to die on is almost like self-satire.”
You’re right, there’s a perception of nerds being ‘harmless’ but they can be dangerous.
There have been examples such as Elliot Rodger. He killed six people between the ages of 19 and 22.
“I was very nervous about writing the piece because it has affected people in real horrific, tragic ways, but there’s a couple of interviews with some of the parents of people who were killed by him who were like, ‘Yeah, we just need people to reach out to these men and somehow to pull them back in, these alienated young men’.
“They’re just so frustrated and so bitter and torn up that they just want to lash out at the world.”
So you have to consider that as people have lost loved ones.
But also this isn’t the story of that or of Elliot but your own fictional story.
“Yeah, it’s fictional and it’s more about the ideas underlying it all and about how these guys are just lost and have had hard lives, but also there’s this ideology of self-pity and ‘Woe is me’.
“They’ve constructed this ideology of, ‘We live in this world now where we can’t possibly get partners’.
“But they don’t have it to help them try and get partners, it’s to justify not engaging with the world: It’s impossible so don’t even try.
“It’s really a whole world view that’s built around not having to engage in society, justifying inaction.
“That’s part of why I wanted to do it through comedy.
“Because their world view and language is so nihilistic and dark and unpleasant, I kind of wanted to approach it through a lighter lens to kind of make it palatable and then also counteract it a little bit because I really didn’t want to make a show that was like, ‘Look at how bad these guys are’.
“Because that just feeds into their own self narrative of like, ‘Yeah, the world hates us and we’re never going to fit in’.”
Is it the hope that the show could reach out to them, maybe bring them back in as you say?
“A little bit, yeah.
“Just broadly, culturally contextualize the conversation that these guys are just lost and bitter and broken.
“That doesn’t justify their words or actions in any way but it can help when you’re trying to frame how to engage with them, you know?”
I asked you about reactions already, but have you seen people recognise people they know in this? It’s not impossible that some can see a family member in this, is it?
“No, I think one of the reasons it resonated for me as well is they feel like an exaggerated version of life online in a way, how we can all get a little lost in a rabbit hole.
“We can all get toxic.
“How we can all get bitter and disenfranchised, they feel very like a hugely cartoonish example of a very typical way of dialogue and speaking that you see being online and on social media or whatever.
“Loneliness is universal as a human feeling.
“I think you can definitely resonate with that aspect and definitely see people in your life who you’ve seen get lost and then instead of being able to reach out to the people around them, they kind of pull away and they withdraw.”
Have you heard much about incel culture in Ireland because we usually hear about it in UK or US contexts?
“Yeah, it’s definitely present.
“I’ve done a little research and one of our cast members Justine Stafford has pretty sizable online following and she gets her fair share of incel types or toxic male kind of trolling and comments and stuff.
“It’s definitely a thing.
“They’re kind of just lurking everywhere.
“You’ll just be on some random page and you’ll see a comment from somebody that’s wildly toxic and unnecessarily vitriolic.”
It doesn’t surprise me at all because Ireland has always had that thing of separating boys and girls in secondary school and ‘othering’ the other sex for both genders in their formative years..
“That was also what connected me to it, I went to an all boys Catholic school and had that experience.
“It was a very toxic male environment and there was one clear way, ‘This is how you behave in this environment to be cool or successful and if you can’t behave in that way, then you’re a nobody, you’re nothing’.
“You can see how it can warp people’s minds and stuff.
“It’s crazy.
“I remember in our school when they did a play with girls and girls would come to the school, guys would just point at them and scream, ‘Girls’.
“It was just crazy.”
Some of the things that inspired it took place in 2014, when did you sit down to write it?
“Last year we did a work in progress version of it at Scene + Heard.
“I had the idea for a few years and then was like, ‘I’ll just submit it at Scene + Heard. It’s a festival in Smock Alley and it’s probably the best way in Ireland for somebody with very little experience just to get a play on stage.
“I did that, and I was so nervous about doing it.
“I tried to drop out of doing it.
“I emailed them. I was like, ‘I don’t think I should write…’
“I was researching it.
“I was spending time on the incel forums and it was just so toxic and horrible and racist, and more than I thought it would be.
“Then one of the organizers, Caoimhe kind of talked me down and she was like, ‘No, we think you should keep working on it’.
“So we did that version and then expanded into like a full version.
“And Lucy Ryan at Smock Alley invited us back to do the full run.”
I get why you could have felt like that and not wanted to immerse yourself too much in this dark world…
“It does kill your sense of joy in life.
“Being near that much misery and that much hopelessness.”
Having persevered, are you glad you did?
“Extremely. It’s very cathartic to turn what is such isolating and nihilistic ideas and language and stuff into a play which is a physical thing and space.
“I’m making it with the actors and there’s a group of us doing this, it’s a collaborative, joy-inducing process, so that feels really good.
“Yeah, definitely glad to have done it overall.”
Is the hope to take it on somewhere else after Edinburgh?
“Kind of, yeah.
“For sure I’d love to do a little tour the UK and Ireland.
“It’s tricky because it’s a big cast so making it work financially is tough.
“But yeah, we’d love to just bring it around.”
The Last Incel plays until 25 August at Underbelly, Bristo Square, Teviot Place, EH8 9AG as part of Edinburgh Fringe. For more information, click here.
