Maggie Dence, Jake Speer and Lucy Bell in Marjorie Prime. Photo: Lisa Tomasetti
When it premiered in Los Angeles in 2014, Marjorie Prime was reviewed as a comedy. At the Ensemble, under the very able direction of Mitchell Butel, there are certainly some funny moments but the treatment of Jordan Harrison’s play, which takes the use of our ‘technological devices’ to whole new levels, is more thought-provoking than comic.
The opening scene sees elderly Marjorie (Maggie Dence), frail and arthritic, talking to a dapper besuited young man (Jake Speer). Her memory is faulty these days and the young man launches into a tale about the day they went to see My Best Friend’s Wedding, right before he proposed to her.
What? Yep. The young man isn’t actually human, he’s a prime who has been programmed to be Marjorie’s deceased husband Walter. Whatever information he has been fed – by Marjorie or by her daughter Tess (Hillary Bell) or son-in-law Jon (Richard Sydenham) – can be regurgitated and spoon-fed to Marjorie. Walter, the prime/hologram, is her new constant companion.
Richard Sydenham and Lucy Bell. Photo: Lisa Tomasetti
I found this really sad, that Marjorie, or those like her in a (as yet fictional) future not too far away, has to rely on devices in her final days to offer some solace, some contact with memories and lives lived. Of course, there are more positive spins to put on it – is the AI companionship better than none at all just one of the questions posed here? Another is who controls the memories? If you’re programming a prime, great chunks of important information can be left out or altered.
“What if we’d seen Casablanca instead?” Marjorie asks. The Walter prime can take this as an instruction and substitute Casablanca for My Best Friend’s Wedding. Not sure if that’s going to help, but you see where it’s going.
Time passes, Marjorie dies and is replaced with Marjorie Prime. Now Tess can reprogram her memory of her mother into one she presumably finds more palatable. “Why don’t you tell me more about myself?” the prime asks Tess politely who obliges with what she wants to remember. Just no one mentions the fact that the real Marjorie’s son Damien – Tess’s brother – committed suicide. That might be upsetting. To everyone.
On the other hand, I wondered, would it give comfort if you could say all the things that you wanted to say, but never did, to your dead husband/parent/child?
The set design (Simon Greer) is clean and stark, making excellent use of the space available, and Alexander Berlage’s lighting is especially effective. A fine ensemble cast switches easily and believably from their human to prime personas.
The last scene in which Tess, Marjorie and Walter primes are all chatting about “themselves” is quite spooky. But then Marjorie Prime is an unsettling play. Human memories are faulty, sometimes erased, blocked and/or sanitised. It’s worrying to think that machines could be around to aid, alter and abet those patchy memories. Yet, more and more, technology is pretending to be human. The new Google Assistant inserts “um”, “ah” and “mm-hmm” into the conversation to make it sound more life-like.
Brave new world.
Marjorie Prime plays at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli until July 21.
