Tom Lyall in DEFRAG_ (Photo: Inigo Alcaniz)
When: 28th November – 15th December 2012
Where: 58 – 60 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PY
£: 10, concessions 8
What is it?
Tom Lyall’s one-man science fiction epic will be the headline performance at the Futureshock festival at Camden People’s Theatre. Part existentialist TED talk, part unlikely romance, DEFRAG_ is an ambitious and humane work of metaphysical theatre.
Lyall’s witty script spins a tender story of lost love and artificial intelligence into a global fable spanning the collapse of civilisation. The writer and performer plays a damaged soul attempting to back up and recover the fragments of his life. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a digital archive system called Madeleine begins to develop a mind of her own and things take a turn for the altogether stranger. DEFRAG_ develops into an absurd dialogue between Lyall and an offstage, computer-synthesised voice reminiscent of the iPhone’s Siri, who nurses, instructs and flirts with him, ultimately guiding him to a moving moment of self-realisation.
DEFRAG_ written by and starring Tom Lyall (Photo: Ludovic des Cognets)
Tom Lyall is a London-based writer and performer who has been a key creative contributor to some of the most exciting independent theatre of recent years. The Camden People’s Theatre Futureshock festival invites Britain’s most exciting new theatre artists to stage their visions of the worlds to come. Will human beings escape their own minds and bodies, and fuse with machines? Is the end of the world nigh – and if so, how will it feel?
More info: Visit tomlyall.com, justamust.com and cptheatre.co.uk.