Minority Report, Lyric Hammersmith review — timely tale of AI thought police rebooted

Forget Tom Cruise. In fact, forget John Anderton sprinting round a futuristic DC with his eyeballs in a plastic bag, pursued by flying cops and spooky animatronic surveillance spiders. David Haig’s new stage adaptation of Minority Report starts, as does Steven Spielberg’s 2002 action movie, with Philip K Dick’s sci-fi novella. But Haig reboots the story to focus hard on the moral conundrum at its core — freedom versus safety — and to align it, cannily, with current concerns. Smart idea; sadly, mixed results.

Here it’s Julia — rather than John — Anderton who is the central character, and she’s a British neuroscientist rather than an American police chief. When we meet her it’s 2050 and she’s delivering a self-congratulatory speech at the 10th anniversary of Pre-Crime, the system she pioneered that uses “neuropins”, implanted into every citizen’s brain, to identify potential murderers and arrest them before they act.

Having your thoughts literally policed is a reasonable surrender of personal liberty, argues Julia (Jodie McNee): murder has been eradicated; children play safely in the streets. But then the system identifies her as a “pre-murderer” and suddenly she’s less convinced. Soon she’s on the run, brawling with cops, creeping across fire escapes, hanging out with underground resistance group Cogito and breaking into buildings to prove her innocence. Accompanying her is the tormenting question: could she murder someone and, if so, what might drive her to it?

The arguments are intensely pertinent for an audience familiar with mounting discord over free speech, AI, algorithms and whether convenience outweighs the vast harvesting of personal data by our smart gadgets. Haig introduces, too, witty contemporary gags: Apple watches are considered “retro”, Julia threatens to strip her sarcastic digital assistant (Tanvi Virmani) “back to an Alexa” and the whole authoritarian system was voted for in a referendum.

Max Webster’s pacy production zips through the story in 90 minutes, embracing the confines of the stage to create a sense of urgency and claustrophobia. Jon Bausor’s clever rotating set of scaffolds and screens, together with Tal Rosner’s video work and Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting, achieve chilling dystopian effects. Notably, it seems to be always raining in 2050s London: smart tech hasn’t sorted out the weather, then.

All this is fun, sharp and visually impressive. But the characters are very slenderly drawn: even Julia, despite McNee’s vivid, intense performance, feels remote. And the show surely ought to chill and thrill more deeply than it does. It’s held back by some clunky plotting — it’s hard to credit, for instance, that Julia could break into the Pre-Crime headquarters so easily — but even more by a lack of interiority.

For all the running around, the drama is at its most gripping when it gets closest to the human dilemmas. There isn’t nearly enough of this or enough gnarly, in-depth discussion of the huge moral issues at its heart, particularly given how timely they feel. We’re living in a year when the use of deep fakes threatens to undermine democracy, when arguments rage over free speech, liberty and security. With a closer, subtler interrogation of these very present dilemmas, it could really hit home.

★★★☆☆

To May 18, lyric.co.uk