Virtual Realism and Black Feminist World-Building in seven methods of killing kylie jenner by Jasmine Lee-Jones

While theatre-makers have responded to the challenges of staging the Internet in many different ways in the last thirty years, there persists a critical assumption that realism is incapable of representing this aspect of contemporary reality. However, I suggest such a dismissal of realism insists upon a false dichotomy between the “real” and the “virtual” that does not account for the intermeshing of the two in twenty‑first‑century life. I argue that Jasmine Lee‑Jones’s seven methods of killing kylie jenner (Royal Court Theatre, 2019) develops a form of “virtual realism” (Bay‑Cheng) that centres its characters’ subjective experiences as young Black women. While at first, Lee‑Jones’s script and Milli Bhatia’s production maintain “IRL” (In Real Life) and the “Twittersphere” as two distinct worlds with distinct theatrical languages, their eventual convergence suggests the impossibility of separating online activity from life offline. Moreover, the play and the production suggest a powerful analogy between Black feminist activism and theatrical realism as having the potential to imagine a different world, without neglecting critique of the status quo. Ultimately, thinking of seven methods as a realist play, not despite but because of its formal experimentation, productively expands our sense of what realism can do and how it can engage critically with the contemporary world.