Internet chat-rooms gave playwright Richard Hurford the inspiration for a role-playing drama, as he tells Charles Hutchinson.

WHEN trying to shred the cyber mountain of e-mails that head this way from artists, musicians and persistent penis enlargement companies alike, the computer will ask ever so politely whether you wish to "delete permanently".

Tautological as that request may be, there is no such thing as a permanent cut-off point, and that is as true in the computer world as it is in the hushed corridors of vasectomy operations.

"You can't delete your history," says Richard Hurford in his new play at the York Theatre Royal, a/s/l?, age/sex/location. "Sooner or later it will come back to haunt you and destroy your life."

Commissioned by Pilot Theatre, Hurford enters the cyber-contact zone of the Internet chat room in a/s/l?. His narrator, Livia, is a 15-year-old girl who has just committed suicide, burdened by the activities of her chat-room alter ego, Jenny, triggering a spate of copycat murders. No delete button can erase what she has done.

Hurford, whose past work at the Theatre Royal has included adaptations of Frankenstein and The Three Musketeers, was given an open commission by Pilot to come up with a new work, and a haunting piece it is.

"I knew I wanted to do something about parents and children and, at that time, I was working with some students at Bretton Hall the West Yorkshire training college. I heard them talking about Internet chat rooms and how much time they spent in them and the different identities they assumed in there," Richard says.

"The whole notion of taking on identities and playing out roles had a theatrical linkage, and I thought 'Is there something I can explore here?'.

"So the two elements of parents and children and chat rooms came together in one story, with the chat room being an interesting place to explore relationships of parents and their children. It was a place where I could explore the balance between protecting children and allowing them to explore the world and make their own mistakes."

Richard had first mulled over the possibility of a chat room play three years ago.

"Since then we've seen more and more stories about chat rooms. My idea had come before that but now clearly it's an activity that's causing a lot of concern and confusion. It's that old thing of technology moving on before we've sorted out how to deal with it."

In this age when Microsoft has announced the closure of its chat-room service, Richard can nevertheless see the attraction of this communication highway. That is both a boon and a burden.

"Chat rooms gives us the opportunity to communicate instantly with millions of people and to play roles. What it does is free us of inhibitions and allow us to say things that we would never say in real life, on the basis that 'you don't know who I really am, you will never meet me, you can't see me'," he says.

"A chat room allows you to explore aspects of your psyche that you wouldn't otherwise be able to so, but it does have a malign side, a dark side.

"The chat-room world can seem better than the real world in that in real life you need time to develop relationships, whereas inside five minutes in a chat room, you can be saying things about yourself without worrying about brushing your teeth or that spot on your face.

"Because it's such an easy way to make links, in future, investment in real relationships will seem too like hard work."

Pilot Theatre is presenting a/s/l?, age/sex/location, in The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until November 15. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 10:14 Friday, November 07, 2003