Theatre review: More Life

Billed as a sci-fi gothic horror, Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman's More Life is a riff on Frankenstein (something it acknowledges several times) set in 2075, when medical advances have allowed those who can afford them to slow down the ageing process by a couple of deacdes, but haven't quite eliminated human mortality altogether yet. But the next step towards that might just have been taken: Alison Halstead plays a synthetic human that doesn't need to eat, sleep or breathe. Vic (Marc Elliott) and his assistant Mike (Lewis Mackinnon) now need to find the right consciousness to animate it, out of many brains donated to their shadowy organisation over the years. Many can't handle the realisation that they've died and been brought back in a new body, but eventually the scientists find Bridget, a young woman who died in a car crash in 2026 (caused by one of the company's own prototype driverless cars.) A few adjustments to the code that stores her consciousness, and she's ready for a new life.

Yeatman directs Mooney's text in a production that gets increasingly naturalistic as Bridget settles into her new body: At first Halstead lip-syncs dialogue provided by the rest of the cast, until finally finding her bearings and being able to use her own voice.

On an orange set by Shankho Chaudhuri that suggests a 1970s view of the future, we gradually move out from learning about Bridget's new body to the new reality outside it, finding out in dribs and drabs about a world that seems to have gone through some horrors - but as the people we meet are all among the lucky, wealthy ones, they largely avoid details about what happened to anyone outside their Center Parcs-style bubbles.

Among the survivors is Bridget's husband Harry (Tim McMullan,) who along with his new wife Davina (Helen Schlesinger) was among the lucky ones not only to have survived whatever apocalyptic event took out all their friends, but also to afford the health treatments that allow the 80-somethings to be played by actors 20 years younger. After his horror at discovering his first wife's consciousness has been reanimated (he has no recollection of agreeing to donate her brain, and there's an underexplored thread that the company might have slipped that into the paperwork he signed when they paid him compensation,) he starts to see Bridget as a way of connecting with who he used to be.

The first act of More Life is the more successful one, and the one that leans more into the billing as a gothic horror: It wraps up its philosophical questions about consciousness in a claustrophobic thriller as Bridget finds herself trapped not only in the lab, but also in a body that can't sleep so she's permanently alone with her own thoughts. These thoughts now also include an even deeper identity crisis when she realises the current version of herself has been subtly tinkered with to make her more trusting of Vic. By the cliffhanger into the interval it looks like we might even go into a gorier type of horror (when a cheese grater appears on set before the second act I wondered if we might be in for some proper shock value in a venue that, let's face it, has previous in that regard.)

Actually the second act where Bridget escapes the lab and hides with Harry and Davina is where the play loses focus and tails off a bit - there's a lot of ideas the subject matter could explore and the trouble is Mooney and Yeatman try to touch on all of them, meaning none of them actually get their full attention. At some point Halstead starts to share the role of Bridget with "Ghost Bridget" (Danusia Samal,) a vision of herself in her original body; I'm not entirely sure what the purpose here is but I interpreted it as her being able to show the emotions that the perfect-but-perfectly-functional new body feels, but can't express.

Of these themes the ones I most connected with were the ones around the unreliability of memory, as not only is Harry a different person than he was fifty years earlier, he's fully aware of how dusty and rewritten his own memories of that time are. To the revived Bridget those events were only a few weeks ago, so she becomes a way for him to reconnect with what actually happened. Also, even before we get to the bleak ending, there's a theme of the way the human instinct for survival overrides the desire to actually enjoy that long life: The chip implanted in Davina tells her exactly what she needs to do to extend her life, but it means she never eats what she wants and spends half her day joylessly exercising.

But as well as trying to cover too many general themes the plot itself gets muddled in the second act - I have no idea why we get a diversion into a different personality being considered for reanimation, or whether this is meant to tie into Bridget's major crisis of identity later on. The creators' magpie-like attraction to different possibilities means different people will probably see different aspects that appeal to them, but it also means the energy and focus of the first act gets dissipated by the time we return from the interval.

More Life by Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman is booking until the 8th of March at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Helen Murray.