The Daily Telegraph - Features
A glimpse of theatre’s hightech future
Minority Report
Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 ★★★★★
From Blade Runner to Total Recall, Philip K Dick’s dystopian sci-fi fiction has afforded a treasure trove of ideas-rich, adrenal storylines that Hollywood has seized on, often to culturaldiscourse-defining effect.
Steven Spielberg’s 2002 film
Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton, is the biggest PKD blockbuster success (so far) and concerns the possibility of pre-emptive “justice”, where criminal impulses are detected by the state.
Actor and writer David Haig has grabbed the opportunity to bring the tale to the stage for the first time with director Max Webster
(Life of Pi). The premise feels freshly pertinent – this year, it was reported that AI systems were being used to detect criminal activity on the Tube in London. The piece is set in 2050, but it feels as though we’re nearly there.
The differences from the film are manifold. It’s set in the UK, not in the States, and the proselytiser for the “Pre-Crime” system isn’t police chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise in the film) but neuroscientist Julia (an initially cool, nonchalant Jodie McNee). The evening opens with Julia telling us that her passion for a crime-free society in which everyone’s brain is scanned via an embedded chip is rooted in her sister’s murder. But suddenly she is marked as a pre-criminal.
The trio of clairvoyant “precogs”, so prominent on screen, are here relegated to a grand but rather underwhelming reveal. Webster’s production does, though, achieve mission impossible in generating suspenseful jeopardy: with pulsing lighting, a throbbing soundscape and a shifting metallic, grid-like set conjuring futuristic exteriors and interiors.
While the question of free will is probed in passing, the political and psychological dimensions of the piece, hurtling by in 90 minutes, feel too sketchy. But, in the play’s most exhilarating moments, you get an inkling of theatre’s tech-assisted future.