Welcome to Current Affairs.

My name is Nathan Robinson.

I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

It is our great pleasure and honor today to be joined from the United Kingdom by Abigail Thorne.

She is an actress, writer, and the creator of the widely acclaimed and viewed YouTube channel Philosophy Tube.

Abigail is currently starring in and rehearsing for as we speak, a play in London

called Blink.

Abigail, welcome to Curit Affairs. Thank you so much for coming to join us.

Thank you so much for having me, Nathan. It's a pleasure to be here.

Okay, I want to hear about this play because the premise sounds fascinating.

And the other cool thing about this play, I mean, unfortunately not being in Britain,

I have not had the opportunity to see it yet, but the other cool thing about it is that this play written a while ago, but about on themes that have become newly relevant in 2026.

So introduce us to this piece of work.

Blink is a play by Phil Porter. And as you say, it was written in, I think, 2012. So pre-Twitch, pre-only fans, pre-most of what YouTube is, pre-COVID, of course.

And it kind of manages to be about all of them.

It's about this very lonely woman called Sophie, who I play, who basically starts live streaming herself to an audience of one guy in the flat

below her on a video screen. And he doesn't know that she's living above him. So he just kind

of gets obsessed with her and watches her all day and forms a parasycial relationship with her. But

before the term parasocial relationship, even entered the the kind of discourse and so they end up in this very

strange relationship where he's kind of stalking her and she's kind of into it so there's all these very

interesting and i think it says like so much about putting the female body on screens and about like

only fans and the commodification

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