Review: MORE LIFE, The Royal Court

Ozempic can make anyone beautiful and AI will outthink us all. What is left for humanity? That’s the question that’s unravelled in More Life, through an intelligently woven genre-bending mash up with a beating heart at its core from writer Lauren Mooney.

Years after her death in a car crash Bridget’s consciousness is transplanted into a synthetic body by a scientist hell bent on saving humanity. She’s the first of her kind, a human that will not die and does not suffer pain or hunger. A Frankensteinian makeover for the age of wellness and skin oils.

You can detect the inspiration, particularly from metaphysical thought experiments, Derek Parfit’s Teletransportation paradox in particular. But the second act astutely relegates undergraduate musings to the background and lets the emotional fallout ebb and flow into the limelight.

Bridget returns to her ex-husband Harry, now old and remarried. For him a lifetime has passed, but for her, only a few minutes between dying and waking up fifty years later. How can the same relationship reconcile itself stratified through two perspectives, one ravaged by fading memories of old age, the other eerily present but out of kilter with a vastly different reality? From all the genres swirling around in the mix, romance is the one that floats to the top, but this is anything but a Valentine’s day schmaltz-athon.

The heartfelt drama sinks under the weight of its philosophy but in a way so gently mesmerising that you will hardly care. Yeatman directs a slow burn, and though there are enough dramatic explosions, winks to gothic violence inherited from its cultural predecessors, the focus is firmly on the earnest intimacy of its humanity, and looming behind it, death.

In a moment of desperation the immortal Bridget contemplates suicide at the push of a button on the machine that resurrected her. The poignancy couldn’t be timelier – in light of the Assisted Dying Bill debates about a “good death” stir delicate debates in political spheres, across newspaper columns and over dinner tables. That question in More Life doesn’t slap you in the face with jittery immediacy, but it marauds menacingly. You can’t ignore it. 

Alison Halstead echoes that sense of haunting as the android Bridget . Her stiff movements conjure an uncanny serenity, as if her brain and body are not quite intertwined. But her piercing gaze is a window to her soul beneath. A vision of the past Bridget, as she was when she died, occasionally lingers behind her, the ghost in the machine yearning to break free. It’s all the more heart wrenching opposite Tim McMullan’s searingly endearing Harry, earnestly desperate to navigate the situation’s terrifying weirdness.

Shankho Chaudhuri’s gorgeously retro futuristic design, an orange wall lined with square gaps could be a lost set from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s a perfect encapsulation of More Life: science-fictive imagination but grounded in tender and tangible humanity.  

More Life plays at The Royal Court until 8 March

To post a comment, you must register and login.