Great potential lost in a tangled, overcrowded, script.
bodies is a single act play, depicting a single evening in the lives of 3 people and an AI home assistant. The decisions made with the lighting used to portray Home were excellent; they were on the ceiling and the walls either side of the stage. This brought the feeling of being surrounded and observed to a higher level. In the final moments of the show, where Home is being switched off, the use of the lights again was wonderful as they went off one by one until it was pitch black. Another clever, and very fun, choice was the costume for Thomas Kemball when he was on stage as the embodiment of Home – the bright orange was a stark contrast to everybody else on stage, so he stood out as different, but the choice of having “virgin” emblazoned on the top was incredibly funny given some of the conversations had during a game of Never Have I Ever part way through.
However, it was never completely clear as to why Home is represented on stage for a significant portion of the show by a person. For some of the show, particularly the beginning, Home has a disembodied voice and is conversed with like this. When the narrative Home spouts is that they do not have a body, and therefore do not totally understand humanity, it is strange to give them bodily representation on stage – this was emphasised during a long portion of the play where Kemball was stood to one side on stage and not part of the action. It was clear that Home was watching the people, it seemed unnecessary to have someone represent them.
That was not the only seemingly unnecessary aspect of the play. The script felt extremely tangled in places, and often unnecessarily busy, in other places it felt as though the cast had forgotten their lines. Although as this happened in multiple places it is, perhaps, more likely that this repetition and loose dialogue was, at least on occasion, found within the script. The characters felt inconsistent, occasionally weighty and more developed, but at times two-dimensional with repetitive dialogue that seemed to be going nowhere. These speeches created many moments of feeling “where is this going?” – this was sometimes due to being excited by where something might be leading, and sometimes due to not being able to follow the purpose of something that was clearly seen as important.
bodies lacked a clear direction, with so many threads involved in the story and not enough time to put any respectful amount of weight into any of them it would have benefited from cutting some of their mentions completely or lengthening the show. The play touched on relationships, infidelity, polyamory, AI, AI wanting to be human, love, feminism, the meaning of life, emotional labour, and mental health issues – to name a few. This was too much for a 55-minute play to cover and effectively consider. bodies also lacked clear pressing or manipulation from Home of the three people present in the house. The description of the show suggests that Home decides to press their insecurities intentionally, knowing it will cause distress, so that he can learn more about humanity – this manipulative intent did not come across at all. Home seemed more like a distressed child watching his parents on the brink of divorce than anything even remotely resembling self-interested manipulation.
I wanted to like this play, I really did, I was intrigued by the description and had hope throughout the opening despite the opening night technical difficulties, because there was so much potential in it. The actors portrayed their characters well – I liked some characters more than others, for example, I found it hard to empathise with Sam because I found her difficult to like but that was due to the effectiveness of Deborah Acheampong as an actor. However, despite the potential in the script, and there being so many threads in the air to grab onto, absolutely none of it landed.