The Ethics of Progress at Jackson's Lane Theatre

“Spooky action at a distance” was Einstein’s memorable description of the paradoxes inherent in quantum mechanics – and the words “spooky” and “weird” crop up more than once in Jon Spooner’s engaging one-man show about the places theoretical physics may soon take us.

As adults the vast majority of us, physicists excepted, take for grant that the world works in certain ways, and that everything is governed by a set of basic laws and rules; so to learn that the very smallest particles are not subject to these laws – in defiance of classic Newtonian physics – is a bit of a head-fuck: Spooner is clearly still spinning.

Written together with Chris Thorpe and Clare Duffy of Unlimited Theatre, The Ethics of Progress, a kind of everyman’s guide to superposition and quantum entanglement, came about following a process of conversation and consultation with Oxford University’s Professor Vlatko Vedral. Spooner describes how teleportation is theoretically entirely possible and goes on to outline what a future in which humans are capable of teleportation might be like. He draws an amusing but apt parallel with a pre- and post-wheel world: making the obvious but still persuasive observation that something which brought us so much in terms of agriculture, industry and freedom of movement is also a fundamental tool of warfare and environmental ruin. From here he extrapolates a possible future in which teleportation technology comes to be a boon in terms of global travel and the averting of humanitarian crises, but on the flip-side, there’s also an unnerving sequence in which he describes a scenario of potential genocide-by-teleportation.

Like the neuropsychologist Paul Broks, in his book Into The Silent Land, Spooner finds himself questioning what all this means in terms of the soul. If we’re all just data, a collection of transferrable particles, what does this mean for the essential stuff that is us?

It’s important, he says, to think about the social and ethical – and spiritual – consequences of new technology because it’s on its way. He uses the recent rapid advances in communication technology as an example, the way they’ve utterly and fundamentally changed the way so many of us interact. Some people find this exhilarating, others deeply troubling, but to a younger generation of digital natives it’s simply how things are. Spooner is not however advocating technophobia, if anything he’s excited about the possibilities; but he does stress the necessity for imaginative questioning. We need to think about this now, he urges, because we can’t simply turn the clocks back if the future isn’t as bright and shiny as we’d hoped (well, actually, as it transpires in the post-show Q&A with Vedral, maybe we can – but that’s another story).

Spooner’s show has a lot in common with Robin Ince’s exercises in Carl Sagan fanboyism. There’s something endearingly lo-fi about explaining scientific innovation with the help of a laptop and a couple of stools and in its own quiet, geeky way it’s like the clarion call which fills the final pages of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma, a call to keep questioning things, to ask and ask and ask, because the future is coming and all we can do is be ready.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Memoirs of a Biscuit Tin at Jackson's Lane Theatre

This house is a lost house; cobwebbed, dilapidated and dusty, it has been forgotten. The old woman who once lived here has disappeared but no one has come looking for her; she is remembered only by the house itself. The chimney, the wall and the floor are given physical form. Clad in Miss Havisham rags, simpering and mugging like Playschool presenters they pine for their lost owner. Slowly, using objects scattered around the abandoned house they piece together the life of the missing woman: they give her a name, a past, a story.

Maison Foo’s poignant if rather broad-brush production was inspired by the performers’ experiences of working with the elderly. There’s something very touching in the way the fragments of a person who has been diminished and eroded by dementia are pieced back together, making them whole, even if the company have saddled both the piece and themselves with an awkward and overly elaborate narrative framework. The performers spend a very long time establishing that it is the house itself that is telling the story: so we see the floor getting overexcited at the memory of the hoover, while the chimney alternates between soot-clogged coughing and minor flirtations with the front row.

The stagecraft is impressive, blending elements of clowning and physical theatre with puppetry, and there is something particularly satisfying in the way they utilise every prop to create a recognisable world: a balloon and a piece of fabric become a small child, a coat-stand becomes a dashing young suitor, a picnic blanket and a straw hat create a fleeting yet idyllic afternoon in the sun. But while these shards of memory, these glimpses into the past, are often genuinely moving, in the favouring of the archetypal over the specific, the production is self-limiting. Mrs Benjamin, the woman who is both the absence and the presence at the centre of the piece, is not so much an individual as a portrait of every aging person whose sun-flecked past has faded to grey.

While it’s well-intentioned (the company are touring the work in partnership with Dementia UK) and well-executed, there is something a little twee in its presentation. It’s at its strongest when exploring the cruelty of dementia, conveying a strong sense of bewilderment, decay and increasing distress, but the depiction of life leading up to this moment is more formulaic, the milestones obvious and the storytelling simple: courtship, marriage, bereavement. The method of telling is visually appealing but dramatically the piece is rather narrow, and while the concept of the house as narrator is a resonant one, it feels too blunt, too literal.

The strongest sequences are also the darkest and most jarring, scenes that elegantly evoke loneliness and decline in old age, social isolation and its consequences, but elsewhere the company rather hammer their point home in a way that teeters on the edge of being patronising. It’s when they unshackle themselves from this tendency and trust their material and their audience more, that the production’s considerable charms become clear.

Reviewed for Exeunt