Marjorie Prime review: Anne Reid anchors this overly cosy AI play

Anyone currently trembling in fear that their job will imminently be replaced by artificial intelligence will be soothed by the gentle vision of an android-filled future presented in Marjorie Prime. Brooklyn-based playwright Jordan Harrison wrote this lightly dystopian play nine years ago, before Chat GPT’s terrifyingly good AI software was successfully deployed to generate everything from movie posters to sonnets to wedding vows. Accordingly, he imagines a world where androids are flawed helpmeets to humans, rather than sinister overlords. It’s a strange, slightly outdated choice of play for Dominic Dromgoole (former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe and Bush Theatre) to pick for his first stage production in years. Still, it offers a thoughtful meditation on ageing and loss, laced with a little sci-fi eeriness.

Last Tango in Halifax star Anne Reid is the warm beating heart of this show as 85-year-old Marjorie: she’s wonderfully ribald, full of life, and anything but pitiable as she lives with dementia. But then, she’s got lots to be cheerful about. She’s got Walter (Richard Fleeshman) to nudge her memory. He’s a “Prime”, or an accurate android facsimile of her late husband, forever aged 30 (it’s amusingly insinuated that she wanted him at his very hottest). Their surreal conversations are full of accidental humour that comes from his only partial understanding of the human psyche – he works by thirstily drinking in the stories that Marjorie and her family tell him, then repeating them back with mingled naivety and profundity. “She was the most beautiful woman in town,” he tells her, narrating her life back to her as a bedtime story, before puncturing the mood by adding that “it wasn’t a very big town.”

But if Marjorie and Walter’s relationship is sweet, albeit in a peculiar way, it’s soon supplemented with other, more troubling uses of android technology. Marjorie’s technophobe daughter Tess (Nancy Carroll) is initially repulsed by the idea of having a Prime roaming about her kitchen, but soon she sees the device’s therapeutic potential to mend her broken relationship with her mother. And Jon (Tony Jayawardena) goes even further, working out how to feed the Prime with morsels of family secrets he thinks should be brought out into the open, or to nudge this android into giving him the love he feels his human relatives aren’t fully providing.

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This play is set 40 years in the future, but AI could already easily create something with a Prime’s conversational skills now. And as AI throws up so many ethical talking points, it’s somewhat disappointing that Harrison’s hints at some of the darker possible uses of the Prime don’t come to much: this play’s tone is as even as a grey-painted wall. Scenes move at a ponderous pace, static and talky, and bound by the limits of designer Jonathan Femson’s beautifully mellow wood-lined living room.

Still, it’s a satisfying 80 minutes at the theatre with a more abstract final scene that gestures to a more chilling potential vision of the future, one where humans could be squeezed of their stories and then discarded, like used tubes of toothpaste. It’s a welcome note of terror in a play that often feels too cosy.

Menier Chocolate Factory, until 6 May