Review: NOT ONE OF THESE PEOPLE, Royal Court Theatre

Is Not One Of These People a one-man or a 299-person show? Celebrated auteur Martin Crimp returns to the Royal Court with a work that astounds and amuses in equal measure.

"I'm not exactly blackmailing my boss."

This co-production between The Royal Court Theatre and Quebec's Carte blanche and Carrefour international de théâtre sees a collaboration between the ever-experimental Crimp and Canadian theatre director Christian LaPointe.

"I can't stand mirrors. The person in the mirror is not me."

Using a Generative Adversarial Network, LaPointe created a live deepfake generator which deploys AI wizardry to envisage 299 faces, none of which actually exist.

"I've noticed men at my rifle club get very defensive about the issue of consent."

With each face comes its own fictional confession intoned by Crimp himself and expressed as a mini-monologue; these are usually a few words but sometimes a lengthy passage. It is undoubtably a strange experience which one gets accustomed to by the end.

"I stole my daughter's boyfriend. He was too old for her, anyway."

The origins of Not One Of These People lie in the early days of the Covid pandemic. Crimp has had a number of his plays produced at the Royal Court and wanted to create something there which could be delivered later in 2020 when everything would go back to normal (or so he thought).

"And that is when they fired me."

He originally planned to write 1000 lines but scaled this back to 299, at least for now.

"I can hear people on other planets. Not their voices, but their cutlery."

The first one hundred lines are described by Crimp as "'cultural toothache', which is what other people call culture wars."

"I carry a bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid."

The second one hundred lines are inspired by a performance of Speak Bitterness - a long enumeration of confessions - by Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment that Crimp saw in 1994.

"If he hadn't gone down on me, I never would have noticed his bald spot."

The last 99 are based on the concept of chance.

"My parents were therapists."

Crimp is keen to stress that the play "is not just a reading; it's not just an artistic installation; it has drive and development" and he's right. As the various pronouncements progress, there are subtle changes which build up, layer by layer, eventually changing everything about what we initially see.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I don't watch television."

The eyes of the fake faces start blinking and lips start curling up into smiles before they start moving to the words. Crimp is heard offstage then, in a first for him, he appears on stage as part of the play, reading out the words before disappearing behind the projector screen. The screen becomes less and less opaque and we can see Crimp in an office working away. The voices go from being unaccompanied to competing with soft rain, the sound of city traffic then classical music and an electric pencil sharpener.

"To get him to have sex with me, I pretended I was 18."

The cumulative effect is akin to a late night doomscroll: each new face brings a completely different viewpoint to the last , making us laugh, think, gasp, scratch our heads or nod in complete (and sometimes guilty) agreement.

"The bullet went in through his left eye and came out through the back of his head. I told him time and time again to stay out of mummy's bedroom."

The play's structure and intrinsically repetitive nature is overcome by Crimp's witty and insightful commentary on a world which has never had this level of self-expression in its entire history. What could have been performative or pretentious is elevated by LaPointe's measured direction and the inspired set design.

"I made the mistake of growing old."

This is a brave and clever work that uses cutting edge technology to push the boundaries of what can be considered theatre and, as we enter the season of Christmas Carols, Nutcrackers and Handel's Messiahs aplenty, that is no bad thing at all.

Not One Of These People is at The Royal Court Theatre until 5 November.

Photo credit: Carla Chable de la Héronnière

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