There is, believe it or not, a tangible microgenre of plays about AI personality replicas being downloaded into new human bodies. David Farr’s A Dead Body in Taos and Jordan Harrison’s Marjorie Prime would be good recent examples; Caryl Churchill’s visionary cloning drama A Number feels like the originator of the species. It’s the sort of sci-fi theatre that does well: low budget but unnerving – you don’t need special effects for an actor to play an artificial human.
Here’s another one. Under the name Kandinsky Theatre, Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman have devised an eclectic stream of science-rooted theatre shows, many of them for the New Diorama Theatre, new Royal Court boss David Byrne’s old gaff. Now they make their debut at the Court with an occasionally heavy-handed but ultimately moving drama about a woman brought back to life some 50 years after her death.
Victor (Marc Elliott) is a scientist, working on bringing the dead back to life (the Frankenstein references are unsubtle but fully acknowledged). At some point in the past, the tech company he works for acquired the brains of a large number of dead people, whose next of kin signed them away to the corporation. Using Futuristic Science That You Don’t Need To Worry About, the brains have been digitally recreated and the personalities of the deceased are implanted into an artificial body, played by Alison Halstead. Most of them are failures: they either have imperfect memories, lack control of the body or, er, Victor simply seems to find them personally annoying and switches them off. Bridget – sometimes played by Danusia Samal as her past self – is different. She has control and perfect recall. But Victor struggles to win her trust, rebooting her numerous times until he’s worked out how to get her on side.
More Life begins with a prologue describing a real case: the electrification of a corpse in 1802, which ultimately inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley legitimately thought that with enough electricity reanimation might be possible; Mooney and Yeatman’s play self-consciously positions itself as a modern equivalent in asking what if an AI clone of a dead human were possible. But where Shelley generally just got on with it, here the cast of six occasionally breaks from the story to suggest alternative ideas for what this futuristic England might look like. It feels needlessly apologetic, but it gets there in the end for a lovely, melancholic coda that considers the implications of the story hundreds of years after the main plot.
Before that and the official description of the show as ‘horror’ feels a bit of a red herring - it flirts with the genre, and has one particularly alarming, Frankenstein-indebted moment. But on the whole More Life forgoes shocks and nastiness in favour of empathy for Bridget, who must first adjust to having died, then to being alive again. No time seems to have passed to her, but everything has changed – she ends up being taken in by her deeply freaked out ex husband Henry, who sees her as first an object of confusion, then as a link to a past he can barely remember.
Mooney and Yeatman’s light touch, actually-maybe-it-happened-another-way worldbuilding sometimes feels frustratingly uncommitted; Shanko Chaudhuri’s orange set is wilfully abstract. Hints at the society Bridget has woken up in as being some sort of postapocalyptic bastion of privilege feel like social commentary that should have been given more room to breathe. But it is, ultimately, compelling, not least thanks to Halstead’s soulful, troubled performance as a woman – or perhaps a copy of a woman – who finds herself torn between the twin temptations of oblivion and eternity. Sometimes More Life feels embarrassed to be asking the big questions about the future of the human species. But this is when it’s at its most powerful.
