Theatre review: Minority Report

I still have strong memories of the Lyric Hammersmith successfully translating science fiction to the stage with the striking Solaris a few years ago, so while it's a different creative team tackling Philip K. Dick, who inspired a number of the most successful sci-fi movies of all time, I was still optimistic that a venue willing to give the genre a chance would be a good choice to continue the experiment. Minority Report is quite a different proposition from the moody spookiness of Solaris, with the added challenges of a lot of action scenes, and Max Webster's production deals with them with varied - though mostly positive - results. But first, how to ensure future dystopia has the requisite dark cityscape of permanent rain? Adaptor David Haig has solved it by setting the story in London, so the view on stage isn't too different from the one out of the windows.

In a 2050s Britain left crumbling after the dismantling of the NHS, the government inevitably convinced people the way back to happiness involved a crackdown on crime. After - just as inevitably - a referendum, the UK population agreed to be fitted with neural chips that would not only track them everywhere, but be able to predict when their brains were contemplating a violent crime, and have them arrested before they even commit it.

After a decade of murder being all but eliminated, Dame Julia Anderton (Jodie McNee) is CEO of Precrime and looking to expand the technology internationally. She enjoys enough public support to be able to easily dismiss protesters against the system, until the latest report says she herself has been recorded as capable of murder. Removing her chip she goes on the run to prove her innocence.

With both her husband (Nick Fletcher) and the Home Secretary, who's a close friend (Nicholas Rowe,) closely involved with the project, she has to ally with the protesters (Danny Collins and Roseanna Frascona) who've been trying to take her down. They're keen to help her because this embodies the bind she's in: Obviously she wants to prove her innocence, but to do so also means proving her life's work faulty, and brings down the system she's been championing. It's also deeply personal for her, as the only murder victim she failed to save was her own twin sister, and she's convinced herself everything she does is in her honour.

What I liked about how Haig writes and McNee plays Julia is that they're not afraid to make her thoroughly unlikeable from the off. The play begins with her giving a self-congratulatory lecture to mark a decade of Precrime, dripping with superiority and condescension. Her obsession with the project has made her reduce her family and friends to their function in helping her achieve it, and will issue instructions about perfecting the process "whatever it takes" without having to face what that actually means. It means her story can be framed as one of paying for her hubris, while gradually allowing us to see her in a more nuanced light with all the complex reasons she became who she is. She also gets a comic foil in David (Tanvi Virmani,) the virtual assistant that's basically a souped-up Alexa, as Julia likes to remind it anytime it doesn't give her the answers she wants to hear.

It means the show has a bit of depth and development, not to mention the parallels Haig finds with the politics of the 2020s. But the blurb makes reference to the success of Webster's production of Life of Pi, and the ambition of Jon Bausor's design makes it feel very early on like this has similar hopes to make it to the West End at least. Coupled with Tal Rosner's video design and Jessica Hung Han Yun's lighting are clanking platforms and gantries, a scene-stealing self-driving taxi pod, and a steep building McNee and Collins have to climb up in one of the most successful action sequences.

As the central story sees Julia on the run, this means fight scenes - which theatre does well - and chases - which theatre tends not to do, and at times Minority Report reminds us exactly why. Some of the climbing around buildings works very well, but no matter what the lighting around them is doing it's hard to buy McNee clambering out of a stationery vehicle as a high-speed car chase, and when foot chase sequences turn into Lucy Hind's stylised, slo-mo movement sequences, it very much feels like they've run out of room on the stage and used the gift of dance as a last resort. So yes, there are moments where this tips over into naff, but overall it provides the entertaining evening it intends to (I could see Vanessa next to me flinching at some scenes) and if it sometimes shows why sci-fi is rarely staged, at others it shows why it's worth trying.

No, nobody else skim-read "precrime" as "precum," it's just you you perv.

Minority Report by David Haig, based on the short story by Philip K. Dick, is booking until the 18th of May at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.