Tim Price has had enough and he won’t shut up about it. Instead of keeping quiet he writes plays, shouting from some of the UK’s biggest stages about the mess we’re all in: a young solider proclaimed an enemy of the state, a country on the verge of disintegration, a fight against capitalism that accidentally involves the homeless. It’s headline material in 3D, circumventing the lack of trust in traditional media and the easy conclusions to afford everyone a breather and a chance to stop and reconsider.

Next up: hackers. Teh Internet Is Serious Business is a Royal Court commission that saw Price befriend Jake Davis and Mustafa Al-Bassam, two former LulzSec members, to tell the story of hactivism and its ‘permanent dance with law and morality’. In anticipation we managed to get hold of Price for long enough to hear his musings on real-world interrogations from the stage, social mobility IRL and online and the devastating effect of privilege on theatre in general and short actors in particular.

Run Riot: You’ve written about Chelsea Manning, Occupy, Scottish Independence and Anonymous, brining front-page stories into theatres. What can (or should) theatre do when it comes to big politics? Is it the place to spark change, shape opinions, look beyond the news bulletins.... or something else? 

Tim Price: Theatre needs to illuminate or interrogate the real world at all times otherwise it is irrelevant. Writers can interrogate the real-world by shining a light on the truth of how compromising it can be to flat-share or why someone decides to leak the largest amount of data in history; both are as necessary to the audience. 

Globalised capital has organised the audiences' lives in ways so they don't have time to reflect upon these things, they are barely clinging on to property, careers and family. An audience should leave a play entertained but also a little more equipped to understand their own behaviour. That might be compulsive toothpaste stealing, or inspiring acts of conscience, both are vital to us as people.

It's the job of story-tellers to help audiences gather thoughts they already have but haven't had the privilege to articulate. 

Run Riot: Teh Internet Is Serious Business was researched first hand, with former Anonymous and LulzSec members. What kind of relationship did you have with them? Can you tell us more about the part they had in devising the play? 

Tim Price: Throughout the researching of the play I got to know many hackers, and netizens. I have forged close friendships with Jake Davis and Mustafa Al-Bassam, the two boys are the heart of the play. I have told fictional, dramatic versions of their stories but it is all based on them and their exploits. I got to know Jake first, and went to his and Mustafa's sentencing at Southwark Crown court. When Jake was sent to Feltham young offenders institute I sent him books and we would write to each other. They are two of the most extraordinary young men I have ever met, and it has been a joy to get to know them. This will not be the last we'll hear of them, I am sure.

Run Riot: The Royal Court’s season is devoted to revolution – and revolutions, including those attempted by Anonymous and LulzSec, often include illegal actions that are ethically less clear-cut. Were you interested in touching upon this negotiation between legality and moral ground? 

Tim Price: Yes I think lots of the things I'm interested in centre on the line between what is legally wrong yet morally right. Chelsea Manning discovered war crimes, yet had to break the law to expose them. When Anonymous hacked into the Tunisian Government's website and the Egyptian Government's website, that was illegal but was it immoral? When there is state-sponsored murder taking place, how long do you hold onto to the law as your moral arbiter? 

Anonymous is in a permanent dance with law and morality. DDoS is an illegal act, but a lot of activists see it as little more than a peaceful digital sit-in. It causes no damage and is little more than an inconvenience. But then LulzSec went on to hack and leak millions of regular people's data, in what can only really be described as epic trolling. In an effort to show the world how incompetent organisations like Fox and Sony Pictures were at security, they hacked, leaked and publicised what they did, humiliating corporate America from their bedrooms. 

Run Riot: Protest Song looked beyond the first layer of issues raised by Occupy to an often-invisible group: homeless people who suddenly found themselves in the middle of a fight against capitalism. Were there any similar, less often discussed arches in the hacking realms that you were interested in exploring? 

Tim Price: The difficulty with writing about Anonymous is, you have a group of people, who know nothing about each other and their very survival depends on never revealing anything about themselves to anyone. So a conventional story structure where someone breaks down towards the fourth act and is confronted with the character flaw they've been avoiding, just does not work. 

What is interesting in Anonymous is that it's a non-hierarchical, horizontal organisation. It is a group engineered against prejudice, so you may be a pre-teen girl, in Kuala Lumpur, but if you have ability you will rise to the top. 

Anonymous is like the society the Tory party tries to tell us exists but doesn't. Social mobility actually exists in Anonymous because the talented rise to the top, and the mediocre float to the bottom. Unlike in real life where the mediocre stay insulated by wealth, privilege and connections. Social mobility only works if it's a two way street. But what's even more interesting in Anonymous, is that there is no top or bottom, so what happens is talent gravitates to each other, rather than being validated by someone at the top. Talent seeks talent out, and that's what happened with LulzSec. No-one said 'let's create the best hacking group the world has ever seen', they just found each other organically. If no-one's in charge, no-one can stop it. 

And that's what I've tried to capture in the play.

Run Riot: So many pivotal moments in the Anonymous and LulzSec histories happened online – with the protagonists alone in front of their computers, miles or continents apart. How did you approach the challenges of what amounts to staging the internet? 

Tim Price: We only had one rule: no screens, no limits. 

Run Riot: You didn’t go to a public school and you didn’t study at Oxbridge – I hope you don’t mind me saying that makes you a minority in the UK performing arts. How friendly and open is the theatre to artists who come from less affluent positions?

Tim Price: Yes, I am a minority. It is less severe, in the writing community as with this part of the industry you can pursue your craft without connections. But in terms of directors and actors, it is an absolute shitstorm of privilege. It is now incredibly hard to find short actors. That might sound like the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said, but the next generation of actors are all effectively being delivered by Ocado. 

It's not a case of how friendly or open institutions are to artists from less affluent positions; the Royal Court asked me to do the young writing course 8 years ago, but I couldn't afford to take the time off work to travel from Cardiff and stay in London once a week for 12 weeks. They couldn't have been more friendly or open, but the fact is I was not in a position to take that opportunity. Now not everyone from the southeast is privileged, but even if you're from a state-educated background, if you can get to London and back in an evening, because of the incredible disparity between opportunities in London and the rest of the UK that's already a huge advantage over the majority of the country.

If Anonymous has taught me anything is that only through diversity can you get the best crowd-sourced ideas. If your crowd all went to the same school and all read the same books, then you will have the same ideas - and we are certainly seeing that already in the acting and directing community.  

We need positive discrimination for state-educated people. Theatre will go the way of poetry in its irrelevance if it becomes a pursuit only for those who can afford it. We need directors' courses for state-educated people, and we need quotas for state educated actors. 

Privilege affords people resilience in an insecure undervalued industry. I don't have that so I'm going to have to take a break from theatre after this play. 

Run Riot: What happens to how theatre talks about political issues if it becomes a profession for those who can afford it?

It's fucked.

Look at how irrelevant journalism has become. If you want to read investigative journalism you have to buy Private Eye. 

Teh Internet Is Serious Business

Royal Court

17 September – 25 October