Marjorie Prime review

Memories are malleable: they can be curated, edited, enhanced, even invented. But what happens when the way we remember the past doesn’t mirror our loved ones’ versions? And what remains of us, if time blurs recollection and our mind plays narrative tricks?

American playwright Jordan Harrison’s 2014 drama is partly a meditation on how each human existence and identity is constructed from a precarious psychological Jenga-pile of experiences, and how dementia can repeatedly erase and rewrite an individual life story. It’s also a sci-fi yarn: in Harrison’s near-future world, technology uncannily fills the void left by multiple forms of loss.

The play was made into a film in 2017 starring Lois Smith, who created the role of Marjorie on stage, alongside Jon Hamm, Tim Robbins and Geena Davis. Dominic Dromgoole’s production is just as skilfully acted by a cast led by an absorbing Anne Reid. It is meticulous, intelligent and rather chilly.

In a seaside cabin (Jonathan Fensom’s design evokes Scandi-Cali boho comfort), Reid’s elderly Marjorie exchanges fragmented conversation with a serene young man, Walter (Richard Fleeshman). His perma-half-smile and hydraulic movements betray him as non-human: he is a Prime – a holographic bot, created in the likeness of Marjorie’s dead husband in vigorous middle youth.

To program a Prime, users must feed the unit information that it will store and use to modify its speech and behaviour. “I have all the time in the world,” Walter declares blandly, a discomfiting reminder that Marjorie does not. His partial impressions of Marjorie will long outlive her – and soon he won’t be the household’s only Prime.

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