Seven Dials Playhouse

Miguel de Cervantes’s work Don Quixote is one of the most famous pieces of fiction, often lauded as the first modern novel, directly influencing Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers in 1844 and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897.

Cut to 2024, in a little theatre off Seven Dials actor/performer/creator Duncan Hodgkinson and director/co-creator Jamie Wood give the world another twist on the gleaming tale set….in the future *enter robot beep bep bloop bloop sound effects here.

Dante, a lonely and unfulfilled man trapped between the cycles of work and apartment life in a futuristic society rapidly mechanising its inhabitants. Simple white tape creates this cramped Tokyo-style bedsit well. Seeing as it’s a one-hander the use of a wheeled air-firer wrapped in aluminium foil as a semi-conscious she-bot is surprisingly effective, lessening the threat of monotony inherent in many one-person shows.

The encroachment of AI into the home makes the she-bot’s meddling and presence not too much of a farfetched leap into the dystopian. The society based around forced metallic altruism and self-sacrifice is an interesting one. Dante himself is maybe named in reference to the 1994 volcano exploring robot Dante II, along with the famous Alighieri poem so technology’s limits and implications are felt throughout.

Jousting comedy and dazzling sci-fi soundscapes are a little confused by odd references. One would hope the Kardashians will be a distant memory in almost 60 years, yet they are mentioned by Dante as beauty icons in 2087. Energetic voice work, and clever uses of recorded robot voices aside there is a lot of play sword fighting (with sound effects). It is hard to work out what this has to do with the future of the world or the murky past of Cervantes’s time. The eponymous relationship in the title is the biggest draw and where this piece’s gears really slot into place.

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