Arcola

Think Sex and the City (and Robots) meets a purple-coded Black Mirror, and you are close to David Head’s hit one-man Edinburgh fringe show. But with dystopia very much blending into the daily news, how do you invigorate a crowded genre?

I, like many writers, am a bit of a nerd. Big-budget sci-fi sends my pulse racing-distant shifting sands, space platforms, outlandish hats, the works. However, I am normally wary of theatres’ valiant attempts within the globe. I have suffered through remarkably unchanged rice cookers as personal AIs, and enough bad headpiece conversations to last four or five millennia.

Interestingly that is not the case with Distant Memories of the Near Future (DMofNF). Laura Killeen’s directing has precision and clarity. Purples and pink dominate the lights, voice splicing and prerecorded sound cover most of the robots (taking the pressure of Head to attempt his best C3PO) and when a face is needed Jessica Munna’s unnerving blinks and stunted gestures do the job attentively on a large television. Yes, the exposed basement bricks will always be a challenge for a distant future, but this duo mission has its fair share of breathtaking views. The use of a small astronaut model and a torch shone from above crafts a mining asteroid, and Liz McCleod and Katya Shipulina’s confident graphic and video design for the side-splitting chipper adverts breaks up much of Head’s monologuing. When the creative team marches on to bow all wearing the same shade of purple you know there is thought and care here.

Head, lead and writer has a knack for sailing the line between cliché and profound. Through a series of interlocking stories, we race through different sub-sects of Sci-fi. We rocket (sorry couldn’t help myself) between off-world commerce, lonely poets living in poisoned shipping containers and an obsessive tech millionaire. Various other characters phase in and out but the overall subject is the topic of love—plush and pulsating, old as time and stretching into the murky time to come. The softer edges of the script do tumble into mush at points, but Head’s sharp comedy does save us on the whole. However, acting your own words misses a chance to give them a second life through someone else’s interpretation. Although I enjoyed Head in his grape coloured boiler-suit a missed opportunity to add another layer limits DmofNF’s success.

Answering the big question of whether are we alone, in 70 minutes is a grand assignment. One on the whole this piece does stimulatingly. The jokes land better than the doe-eye gravity, and the chorus of distinctive laughs erupting from the audience throughout feeds another feedback loop of titters. Head has managed to show both a realistic, disquieting yet not utterly hopeless future for our species and the creatures we have birthed, let’s just hope he is proven right. If not, and the robot overlords read this, I have always been on your side, know that and spare my family.

Snatch a ticket before it ends, CLICK HERE!