Saam Farahmand’s Pretender casts Róisín Tapponi as a social media star and wannabe actress who seeks counsel from a ‘cancelled’ actor
There’s a certain kind of character that crosses our screens on a daily basis: they say all the right things, look the part, and arrange their face into the appropriate expressions... but something seems off. Maybe their delivery is a little too perfect, their look too carefully-cultivated, their face too smooth. Maybe their idle chatter, delivered direct to a front-facing iPhone camera, reads more like lines from a script. Residing deep in the uncanny valley, they might feel more like an avatar spat out by ‘the Algorithm’ than a real, living human being.
We’ve invented names for many of the phenomena that give these characters their artificial aura – Instagram face, TikTok voice, vocal fry – but they can all be traced back to a specific time and place, a culture shaped by a generation that came of age on the internet. “The technology has really become embodied and integrated into the very fabric of our being,” Róisín Tapponi, the writer, film programmer, and Shasha Movies founder, tells Dazed. “The ways of moving, the ways of speaking, the micro expressions, the breaths, the tics.”
In Pretender, a new play by the filmmaker and artist Saam Farahmand, Tapponi plays Mimi, a 25-year-old model and aspiring actor who embodies this way of being to the full. To make a living, she mimics iconic scenes from Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada and livestreams it to her three million followers. She’s technically brilliant and primed for social media success. But it’s not enough. “She wants to feel something real.”
This puts Mimi on a collision course with the once-legendary – now “cancelled” – method actor DW Norman, a traditionalist who clings to the tenets of his craft from cultural exile. Across from Tapponi, Norman is played by Peter Duncan, the IRL actor and former kids’ TV presenter who was hounded by the tabloids in the 80s for his appearance in a softcore porn film. “He was the earliest example I can remember,” says Farahmand, “of seeing the tabloids cancel a celebrity.” Mimi seeks tuition by DW, and Pretender centres on their very first meeting, which inevitably flares into a fiery debate about the nature of art and performance. It’s a generational clash that spans acting and artifice, mimicry and authenticity, the shifting tides of cancel culture, and the shrinking-down of cinema into a device that fits in the palm of our hands.
Farahmand first encountered Tapponi when she auditioned for a film he was directing. “I got Róisín’s self-tape and... it wasn’t like any of the others,” he says. Unusually, she read the script alone and stared straight down the camera’s lens. (“This wasn’t me being edgy,” she cuts in. “I just didn’t know what I was doing.”) But ultimately, says Farahmand, she captured something about his lead character that no one else had intuited. Subsequent meetings saw him work closely with Tapponi – a first-time actor – to shape her performance of the scene, and the process reminded him of a story he’d developed several years ago, about a model turned actor. He described this to Tapponi and, by a twist of fate, it turned out she’d written a “very, very similar” project herself. This gave them access to an “instant shorthand” that helped bring Pretender to life.
At its heart, the play confronts a number of recurring subjects for both Farahmand and its stars. Much of Farahmand’s work, he explains, is about the places “where pop culture and the mess of people meet, or where the gloss and artifice of designed experiences meet the mess of what we deem ‘real experience’” – a fault line we’re all too familiar with in 2025. Much of the script was also born out of conversations about where contemporary culture’s headed, Tapponi adds, and how it reflects the times we’re living in.
Ultimately, culture is about trying to find new forms and new languages... to grapple with different conditions under which we’re living – Róisín Tapponi
“Ultimately, culture is about trying to find new forms and new languages to speak to different conditions,” she says, “and to grapple with different conditions under which we’re living.” That begs the question: why a theatre show? Why now? What can Tapponi and Farahmand say on a stage that can’t be expressed through a screen?
“It’s about the intention,” Farahmand (who also makes his theatre debut with Pretender) suggests. “Sometimes, inconveniently, the best way to communicate [an] intention is through a medium that you have no idea about. And rather than wrestle it into a shape that you’re more comfortable with, you wrestle yourself into [the medium] that will serve that intention best.” In this case, the work was “inseparable from Róisín” and required her physical presence to serve the ideas at its core. “The ultimate articulation of this play is not for Róisín to be on a film set with a cameraman, cutting every five minutes, having a macchiato and then doing another take,” he adds. “It is for her to be trapped in a room for an hour with an unforgiving audience, with nowhere to hide.”
The physical presence of bodies is important, too, Tapponi suggests, especially in a culture where creators are so far-removed from their audiences – and audiences are even disconnected from each other as they watch via their own private screens. “How many cultural forms are about that now? How many cultural forms that are relevant are about that?” Anyway, it makes sense that we might need to put down our phones in order to figure out what it means to channel culture through them every waking hour – that we might need to step back to see the bigger picture and learn to “feel something real” again.
Pretender runs at Playhouse East until May 10. Get tickets here.
Pretender is written and directed by Saam Farahmand, and stars Róisín Tapponi and Peter Duncan. Production by Lisa Mustafa and Sebastian Foux, assistant direction by Jeremy Rwakasiisi, sound design by Tomek Bruml, lighting design by Romy, stage management Flick Hemming, art department Amber Kleynhans, with thanks to Simone Mustafa, Jack Dean, Jack Mustafa, and Jesse Ray Graves.