The Double | The Blue Room | Until 11 May | ★ ★ ★ ½
Be warned, there are spoilers in this review
The Blue Room’s 2019 season kicks off with a new offering from Bow and Dagger and director Clare Testoni, who last year brought us Tale of Tales.
The Double introduces us to Victoria, an actress who is heading off to an audition which is slightly different to her regular work where she aspires to be in film and television. Victoria’s audition is to be be the voice and likeness of a computer system, like Siri or Alexa.
Dressed in a simple white outfit with her hair cut into a distinctive bob, Victoria is confident and charming when the time to perform comes. With a mountain of charm and enthusiasm she recites the statements a computer helper would offer. “Good Morning”, “I Can’t Help You With That”, “Can I find more information for you?”
Slowly the company behind the computer system want more and more of Victoria’s time and their lucrative offers are hard to resist, but the actor’s relationships with family members and friends begin to diminish as her life is absorbed by her commitments to the company, and eventually she begins to lose herself.
Testoni has shown on a large number of local productions that she can do some pretty impressive things bringing audio visual elements into stage productions, and this is no exception.
The large projections that fill the entire performance space are impressive, and a wide variety of characters are created through the use of ‘Snapchat’ style face filters that allow the actors to wear a digital mask and create a large number of characters. The technological achievements are flawless.
While Victoria appears on the stage facing the audience, the actors playing the other characters appear left of stage performing into cameras, their images projected onto the back of the performance space.
The pace of this work is a slow boil, and I’m not quite sure if it really reaches the crescendo of boiling point. It’s more a gentle simmer, which is disappointing. A little like being stuck in front of a loading screen, endlessly waiting for an update to be installed, or disappearing down the rabbit hole of online surfing only to realise that hours have passed. The Double creates a trance like monotony, largely because where this play was heading was obvious from the outset.
What this stewing pace does allow the production to cleverly do though is switch the actors playing Victoria. As Victoria begins to lose her identity, the identity of who is playing Victoria changes, and why this is quite brilliant – is that by the time I noticed the actor had changed, I found myself wondering how many times I may have already missed a switcheroo.
The performances of Phoebe Sullivan, Amanda Watson and Michelle Aitken meld into one and other as they all takes turns at being Victoria.
It’s an investigation into doppelgangers for the digital era. While doppelgangers are a recurring storytelling device through the ages, this work made me think of previous works that have investigated the humanity behind technology.
I recalled Tom Stoppard’s 1969 play If You’re Glad, I’ll be Frank featured a man who was convinced that the talking clock was his missing wife – taken prisoner by the authorities and forced to endlessly tell us what the time would be “at the third stroke”.
This work also provokes thoughts of actors who have lent their vocal chords to be the sound of a brand, from James Earl Jones declaring that “This is CNN” to Samuel Johnson whispering “The burgers are better at Hungry Jacks”.
I wondered if Keeley Hawes hesitated at signing on to be the voice of Lara Croft, and when I got home I googled to find out who actually is the voice of Siri?
The Double might not deliver a knockout punch in it’s storytelling delivery, but seeing it will give you a launch pad to think many things about identity, uniqueness, technology and our human connections.
Graeme Watson
