More Life at the Royal Court – review

How much of life’s sweetness is predicated on its fallibility? On its visceral, fluid-filled inefficiencies, its constant requirement for fuel and rest? The feeling of utter exhaustion, followed by refreshment after a long sleep; ravenous hunger, sated by a delicious meal.

Of course much of modern life is aimed at its extension. But as with most ethical questions put to ‘progress’, Kandinsky theatre company’s More Life is about scope: Clean living and Botox are one thing, but what if life simply went on forever? For those who could afford it, of course.

The year is 2075, and private tech company Edius has finally hit on the ultimate life-lengthening technology, that is, if they can find the right test subject. After going through tens of donated brains, they come to Bridget: smart, in control and willing. Having died in a car crash 50 years earlier, they have essentially placed her brain in a cyborg body: The peak of fitness and conventional attraction, it has no need to be fed, to rest, and it will never die. But while Bridget’s grieving husband may have signed off on this experiment – hypothetically, decades ago – does Bridget herself have a say in her own immortality?

A six-way ensemble piece, the script gives a sense that nothing is set in stone, the details of this projected future still in flux: Will there be roads in the sky, will the sky still be blue? What will this human ideal even look like? (A six-foot Cate Blanchett type?) Watching and commenting in any scenes they aren’t directly involved in, this chorus speaks for us, laughing, at first, at the silliness of a high-tech future, but, in time, looking on in horror as the future becomes unrecognisable.

There’s a shared sense of wry hysteria among the cast; the ridiculousness of it all, and yet, the very real-feeling threat of it. Shared between all except Alison Halstead’s Bridget, who is entirely humourless throughout, her arms glued unnaturally to her sides, a look of earnest pathos at all times. Despite her ghost, played by Danusia Samal, recreating the true Bridget for us to connect with once in a while, that’s not how she appears anymore. Humour too is another pleasure that relies on our impermanence; a good joke has to have a punchline, a good story has to have an ending.

Shankho Chaudhuri’s design is beautifully and intentionally pared back: a stack of muted orange cubbyholes lines the back wall, empty in the first half for the clean laboratory, and filled with knick-knacks in the second, when Bridget moves in with her husband and his new wife. According to costume supervisor Isobel Pellow, everyone wears beige and white in the future, a terrifying prospect for any soup splatterers out there, but then again, one supposes we won’t be eating soup when we enter our immortal phase.