THEATRE REVIEW: Electric Rosary - The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester.

Tim Foley is a Manchester-based playwright whose credits already included the 2016 OffWestEnd Most Promising New Playwright Award for his play ‘Dogs Of War’ before going on to win the 2017 Bruntwood Prize for ‘Electric Rosary’ which is now being premiered at Manchester's Royal Exchange. ‘Electric Rosary’ is interesting and engaging, taking a premise used many times in the movies down the years but not so much on the stage: what if there was a robot which looks and sounds just a human which could be placed to live and work amongst us? However, Foley has taken this premise quite a lot further by engaging the spiritual dimension!

‘Bladerunner’,‘Terminator 2,’ and ‘Bicentenial Man’, are just a few of a great many Hollywood blockbusters based around the concept of robots superficially indistinguishable from people where typically the machine has a learning capacity which makes them become more human. In ‘Electric Rosary’, the change is held back well with Mary the robot-nun continuing to act like a machine well into the play. This is explored particularly in relation to logic and feeling and yet the other characters find themselves actually confiding in the machine even to the point of physically embracing it (with the machine amusingly replicating a hug and then trying to analyse its purpose).

Breffni Holahan succeeds in convincing the audience that we are watching a machine inter-relating with people as the other characters increasingly find themselves finding it hard to remember that it is not actually a fellow person in their midst. The transitions are handled very well with Saroja Lily Ratnavel as Theresa touchingly teaching the robot to pray, with the surprising result that it is actually Mary who receives a vision. Olwen May as Constance strives hardest in refusing the robot as a colleague but this story has many clever and surprising twists in store.

‘Electric Rosary’ is very funny with the comedy often coming from juxtapositions of the small group of very different characters in how they try to relate (or not) to the robot but there are other issues, notably whether the Sisters will travel to Equador which is represented as a kind of Mecca. This of course raises the question as to whether the robot could go with them, and as the play progresses we learn something of the nun’s backstories, giving the play added depth as humanity, spirituality and very human conflicts are all explored. There is also a lot of fun in watching how the robot behaves and speaks and there is more to this than might be immediately apparent. The mega-popular Swedish crime drama ‘The Bridge’ centres round a very autistic policewoman whose extreme lateral perceptions bring her into frequent conflict with others whilst ultimately making the character more endearing to the audience. Perhaps we are meant to see in the robot some of the ways our own actions and words are often misunderstood by others.

‘Electric Rosary’ never moves out of the cloistered life of the nuns and this image of church life is well handled which using minimal staging. Ecclesiastical symbols are situated around the gallery of which the characters remain conscious, regularly praying before a large crucifix. We never see the nuns out of their habits with the exception of the robot who arrives in utility clothing prior to receiving nun’s clothing. There are also authentic cappellas sung by the nuns. However, this is a very human play and the characters all come over as real people whose lives are rooted in our world despite their strong religious beliefs.

This is an engaging play that manages to blend comedy with pathos whilst maintaining a consistent pace during a running time of over two hours. An enjoyable but thought-provoking show which was certainly very well received.

Reviewer - John Waterhouse
on - 28.4.22