The theatre-in-the-round space was divided into three sections, like a pie chart. One area was a bedroom. Bachelor Don was excitingly taking out little boxes from a much larger box, in which his new sex robot had just arrived. As anyone who’s tried to assemble flat-pack furniture can attest, the instructions were bewildering and the assembly even more so. Andy Cryer was joyously unfiltered in his performance of how so many men will behave when sex robots do become available. And having everything about the experience going wrong was hilarious.
One section was a room in a mansion on an upper floor. The very rich and very posh Andrea, played snootily by Tanya-Loretta Dee, has a little problem. Her seventeen-year-old son has fallen in love with one of the maid robots. Winston the technician has been summoned to fix her, so that she doesn’t “seduce” the boy anymore (because it’s always the woman’s fault, even when she’s a robot.) This series of scenes, mostly between Winston and the robot E.D., were very interesting. We discover that Winston is a middle-aged incel, whose own sex robot at home has rejected him out of boredom. (That has really got to hurt.) E.D. is a very fetching robot, and as her back panel is poked and prodded, Winston starts to develop feelings for her. Naomi Petersen gave a superb performance as E.D., with lightning-quick snaps from one expression to another, and then perfect stillness. Leigh Symonds was a very sensitive and tortured Winston, buried beneath a continuous layer of engineering jokes.
The third section was the office of a very expensive-looking law firm. Lorraine’s sixtieth birthday is the summit of everything that is wrong in her personal life; and then on top of that, the janitor robot J.A.N. 60 has fallen in love with her. This sequence of scenes, unlike the other two, spanned twenty five years, and expounded Ayckbourn’s philosophies of how a society with so many humanlike robots in it could work. And it included some bleak thoughts. Alexandra Mathie loudly relished every aspect of playing Lorraine, especially when describing her honeymoon with J.A.N. 60 – quite logically, it helps if your new husband is an untiring machine. Georgia Burnell was mercurial and poised as Lorraine’s secretary Sylvia. Richard Stacey was very original as J.A.N. 60. The physicality and voice were reminiscent of C3PO in the “Star Wars” films; the dialogue like Chat GPT-4 on an idiosyncratic day; and there were flurries of weird laughs, vocalisations, and unexpected vibrations that were all Burnell’s own.
Designer Kevin Jenkins used plainness and simplicity in his set design – though I did like Lorraine’s “smart desk”, and want one. With the costumes, he cleverly used a lot of bright colours and unusual cuts so they looked something that was almost in fashion, but in about ten years’ time.
Alan Ayckbourn’s direction was clean and effective, particularly in the scenes involving robots.
One linguistic point to raise with Ayckbourn. The robots were referred to throughout as “androids”, and the term “android women” was also used. “Android” can be used as a term for a humanlike robot in general, or more specifically for a robot that looks like a man. A “gynoid” is a robot that looks like a woman. Science fiction plays attract science fiction fans who notice these details.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 24.10.23
No comments:
Post a Comment