Theatre review: Not One of These People

Martin Crimp is no stranger to the main stage of the Royal Court, although the way some of his past work has gone down there might be why his latest isn't being presented as a full run, but for only four performances - so short that by the time I can write and publish this review it'll already be finished. Or it might be that Not One of These People is being treated more as a short performance art installation, which it was originally conceived as: A rolling monologue that would require only one live performer and some technology, to be part of the theatre's reopening after lockdown. In the end that timing didn't work out so it eventually developed into something different, but still with a novel approach to avoiding crowds of actors on stage together: In Christian Lapointe's production Crimp himself reads the lines of 299 characters, and their faces are projected onto a screen.

And even these faces aren't real, but created by an AI programme that's been built to replicate eerily believable human faces. None of them exist, although presumably the program works by scanning publicly shared photos of real people online, given how many celebrity likenesses there are - Elisabeth Shue, Katy Perry, Lucy Liu, Rob McElhenney and, er, André the Giant all have some degree of digital doppelganger here.

The characters give very short speeches, anywhere from a few words to about a minute at most - from non-sequiturs to more considered thoughts, from the funny to the very dark (and often the darkly funny, a lot of mundane observations take a sharp turn into violence.) There's also a progression in how we see these characters brought to life - at first just still photos that Crimp voices offstage, he eventually joins them at a lectern, before they start to creepily blink, and eventually their mouths move, mapped from the movement as Crimp speaks. By the end he's stopped speaking and wandered off to read and write in a study upstage, his recorded voice taking over as if he's let the characters go off and take a life of their own.

Because thematically there's a lot about the act of playwrighting and creating words for very different people - another origin point for the work was Crimp's discussions with younger playwrights, which made him consider how to reconcile the fact that his job requires him to give voice to very different people, with the fact that it's not necessarily his place to put words in the mouths of people whose experience he doesn't share. So the 299 characters are a consciously diverse bunch in age, race, gender identity and sexuality. From my restricted view seat I couldn't easily see Crimp himself at the side of the stage, but no doubt the sight of an older white man literally voicing the words of, say, a younger black woman, is part of the metatheatrical effect of putting the mechanics in full view, of how a playwright shapes and manipulates their characters.

The AI program is described as "deep-fake technology," and I was a bit surprised that Crimp didn't move away from his side of the creative process and mention anything about actors being worried they'll be out of a job because long-dead stars are being digitally resurrected. Then again if this is the cutting edge they probably don't need to worry just yet: In the still pictures the faces seem realistic but for some reason hair and glasses seem to be beyond its scope and are a giveaway every time; once the characters start moving the uncanny valley effect only gets stronger, sometimes deliberately - in among the perfect faces some weirdly mangled ones, or ones with zombie-like rotting flesh pop up, alongside more comic moments like babies discussing the economic papers they've read recently. In the end there isn't a natural progression to the thought process in Not One of These People, but if viewed as an art installation that doesn't matter so much, and I didn't find it quite as impenetrable as some of Crimp's other work. It also remembers to be, whether comically, thoughtfully or unnervingly, entertaining.

Not One of These People by Martin Crimp is booking until the 5th of November at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Carla Chable de la Héronnière.