Spillikin – A Love Story

SpillikinIt was when reviewing her 1987 single Weak in the Presence of Beauty that Smash Hits said of Alison Moyet that there was nothing so frustrating as a great voice in search of a song which deserved it, and it is not without irony that Helen Ryan’s character Sally, with her bookcase lined with tomes on Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nina Simone, The Ramones and Patti Smith, was a former music journalist who wrote for NME, for she is far and away the best thing in a play whose squandered potential fails to match her talent.

It is October 2029, and slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s, Sally lives increasingly in the past, hanging onto the memories of her teen years when she wanted to be a singer herself, modelling herself on Debbie Harry, her courtship with Raymond whom she met in June 1978 when his mother gave her singing lessons, and their unconventional wedding.

Spillikin3As the play opens, she has been visited by a colleague of Raymond’s who has installed a companion for her, a robot designed to stimulate her mind with conversation and games, to keep her company and to keep her active. “Some people have children; we have robots,” she comments, wondering where her “mad scientist” husband has got to and when he will return, the prevarication of both Raymond’s friend and the robot whenever the subject arises making it immediately clear to everyone but Sally that he will not be returning.

With an animated face and complicated hand gestures down to the individual movement of its fingers, it is impossible to decide if it is Ryan’s interaction with it which gives life to her animatronic guest or if the automaton is so convincing in and of itself, but either way it is a wonder of conception, design and realisation on the means available to a Fringe theatre show. As the scenes change and the lights fade its LEDs dominate the shifting stage as electronic snowflakes fall from the ceiling and the books which line Sally’s shelves vanish as surely as her memories, but from this foundation comes nothing.

Spillikin4As the play moves on, the flashbacks to Sally’s younger self (Anna Munden) meeting teenage inventor Raymond (Michael Tonkin-Jones) become frustrating and intrusive rather than illuminating as they perform moments already described, their arguments demonstrating the inexperience and limitations of both performers, breaking the spell Ryan and her companion have created. Crucially, the loops of Sally’s failing memory echoed in the limitations of the programming of the robot, when her struggle against the inevitable should be the strength of the play, Ryan is sidelined, almost peripheral in the conclusion.

Where the similarly themed Robot and Frank used that relationship as only part of a larger story, here the single strand is far overstretched to an hour and twenty minutes and as much as the robot is a simulation of a relationship, so is too much of this emotion manufactured. As with any technology or creative endeavour, development is crucial, and while this work has great possibility it still requires considerably more work.

Spillikin – A Love Story continues until Monday 31st August

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