Theatre & Dance

Interference

City Park, Glasgow

Three stars

Until March 30

Victoria

Grand Theatre, Leeds

Four stars

At Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

April 10-13

By MARK BROWN

There is something self-consciously zeitgeisty about the National Theatre of Scotland staging Interference (its trilogy of short, new plays set in a near future increasingly shaped by Artificial Intelligence) within City Park in the east end of Glasgow. A former tobacco factory which is now home to offices and call centres, the category B listed building is a symbol of both Scotland’s industrial (and morally dubious colonial) past, and of its technological future.

The opening pair of plays, Morna Pearson’s Darklands (which shares a title with The Jesus and Mary Chain’s second album, but lacks its atmosphere) and Metaverse by Hannah Khalil, seem like companion pieces. In both, an all-seeing, Orwellian entity known as The Company is running the show in a future in which humanity is already well past the tipping point of ecological catastrophe.

In Pearson’s drama, a young couple (Brie and Logan, played admirably by Shyvonne Ahmmad, on her professional stage debut, and Nicholas Ralph) are trying for a baby. This is not easy when they live and work within a facility run by The Company, in which they are largely kept apart and their primary interaction is with a disembodied AI (Maureen Beattie) which assesses and manipulates them on behalf of their employer.

Unable to conceive naturally, the couple find themselves the subject of the ultimate experiment to finally subsume humanity within computer technology.

In Khalil’s play, a scientist (the always superb Beattie) beavers away on a project which, she earnestly believes, will restore a sense of touch to the virtual communications that now dominate human interaction. Desperate for the elusive travel pass that will allow her to be with her daughter, refusing the doubtful pleasures of conversation with her humanoid robot, she discovers that The Company has a very different, decidedly malevolent purpose in mind for her path-breaking research.

Both plays have their merits (Pearson’s use of her native Doric, in a future in which AI speaks in an old BBC English accent, is an unexpected pleasure, for instance), but there is a flatness and predictability in their recourse to well-established dystopian themes.

By contrast, Vlad Butucea’s Glowstick approaches its subject with a flourish of imaginative poetics. Beattie plays (with tremendous empathy) a wheelchair-bound woman who is in terrible pain and under the care of a robot (played with delightful humour by Moyo Akande).

Contrary to the normal, miserablist assumption that AI will, finally, overtake the capacities of the human brain, Butucea’s play asserts an optimistic humanism in the great matters of life and death.

From speculations about the future to reflections on the past, as Leeds-based Northern Ballet premieres Victoria, Cathy Marston’s new choreography about the life of Queen Victoria (who was born 200 years ago this year). The ballet, which comes to Edinburgh next month, ahead of a live cinema event on June 25, considers the iconic monarch through the prism of her diaries, as read by her youngest child, Beatrice.

This literary conceit is a clever one, enabling, as it does, Marston to use Beatrice as an emotionally involved conduit between the audience and Victoria herself. It also allows the choreographer to select episodes from the queen’s life in an order that is not chronological (we begin shortly before Victoria’s death and end with her retreating into widowhood with the four-year-old Beatrice).

Ingenious though this device is, however, Northern Ballet might consider providing synopses to patrons (rather than requiring them to purchase expensive programmes in order to follow the sequence of events). In Leeds, one couldn’t help but overhear numerous interval conversations bemoaning people’s confusion as to the episodes being represented on stage.

This is a minor complaint, however, against a ballet which impresses with its wit, energy and audacity. Humorously unlikely though it is to see Victoria represented by a lithe ballerina, Abigail Prudames dances the role with tremendous grace, dexterity and emotion.

Whether (bereft of her beloved Albert) she is seeking solace in her relationship with John Brown or initially (and archly) forbidding Beatrice’s love for Prince Henry of Battenberg (known as Liko), Prudames renders the queen with great, balletic vibrancy.

The same is true of Pippa Moore, whose Beatrice guides us through the twists and turns of Marston’s story with a combination of subtlety and vitality that speaks to both a classical training and a somewhat modern sensibility in the choreography.

Indeed, there is a Matthew Bourne-ish boldness in a number of Marston’s choices. The scene in which Victoria gives birth to nine children in quick succession is a deliciously comic, yet also pointed, reflection on the queen’s role as a royal baby factory.

Most startling, however, is the erotically graphic representation of the passion between Victoria and Albert, which leads to Beatrice ripping the offending pages from her mother’s memoir.

The piece is danced, with universal excellence, on Steffen Aarfing’s surprisingly (and rewardingly) minimalist set, to Philip Feeney’s beautiful, emotionally attuned music. It is, without question, another triumph in Northern Ballet’s distinctive line of new, narrative choreographies.