Her sense of humour is sharp, and she’s got a canny ability to bring new ideas into focus. She immediately dispelled my first thought about the play being a criticism of social media, as many might assume. It’s not about a relationship online rather this is about a relationship between three people in real life. What is online is the presentation of the story. 

LATE NIGHT STARING AT HIGH RES PIXELS will be shown in 28 individual episode each lasting between 5 and 7 minutes. They are going to be released over 28 days so that the story can be told over time. “So often we’re told a story in ninety minutes. This makes it obvious, yes, he’s a horrible guy, why did you get together in the first place? But relationships develop over time.” It’s also about the relationship between the two women and the respect that they insist on giving one another. “The things you get when you’re refusing to throw the other woman under the bus”, says Athena. 

Athena tells a story about what she calls “assumed consent”. The guy thinks he has consent from his girlfriend insisting “She won’t mind”. However, he’s never actually asked his girlfriend if sharing the photo is okay. She points out that in such conditions “Immediately you have the power taken from you to say yes or no because in this case the photo is already out there".

Athena is a founding member of the Women’s Equality Party which has a core policy on the prevention of violence against women and girls. She admits “at first I thought that had very little do with me, I would be willing to just get along to avoid conflict.”  She hasn’t encountered a physically violent relationship, but she started to see how she was complicit in abuse. 

Stevens argues there is a prevailing attitude of “get in the corner and don’t argue with me, particularly towards vulnerable people that is taking away freedom of speech. Very often such people are expected to say they don’t mind because there is an expectation that they should not create conflict.”

When asked where this attitude comes from, whether it’s cultural or in our genetic make-up, Athena says it’s both. As Margaret Atwood said “Men are afraid that women will laugh at that them and women are afraid that men will kill them”. According to Athena “It’s also very much in our culture to be raised to be ‘nice’. Additionally the adjectives we use for women are very different to the adjectives we use to describe men. There’s a biological component but I think there’s a social one as well.”

“Often women know something doesn’t feel right, but we, particularly young women are taught to call that still small voice of wisdom ‘prejudice’ and therefore ignore our gut feelings. We keep our mouths shut. But oppression is always dependent on silence. So, we don’t speak out and that allows more abuse to happen.” This is a theme running throughout the series. For Athena telling stories about oppression is giving the world tools to dismantle it.

“Working on this play has been an opportunity for grace both in terms of people who don’t realise that what they have encountered is abuse, and people who don’t realise they have been abusive.” We will probably never know the extent to which the series has made that happen, but Athena hopes that both victims and perpetrators can start to understand the story and write a new one.

The form of LATE NIGHT STARING AT HIGH RES PIXELS will give audiences something that they’ve never seen before. It isn’t a re-streamed show. It’s an entire experience of new techniques that are being used to tell a story. Athena says, “In an age when we don’t know what’s going to happen to theatre freelancers, this show can start getting everyone’s imagination going on what is possible under these constrictions.”

Athena Stevens was chatting with Heather Jeffery, Editor of London Pub Theatres Magazine.