Luke Sproule is given a bleak vision of the future... or is it the present?

IN a world where mobile phones are glued to our hands and social media pervades almost every aspect of our lives, it can sometimes seem like we are living with technology as an extension of ourselves.

For Robert in 1927’s production of Golem this is exactly what happens, albeit in the form of his own personal Golem – a clay man who begins life as a helpful labour-saving device and soon morphs into something more sinister.

In literature and folklore people have been creating Golems and controlling them for centuries, and the 1927 do a marvellous job of flipping the premise on its head for the digital age.

Philippa Hambly’s Robert, a socially awkward geek with a hygiene problem, at first undergoes a transformation that would be admired by any tech marketing firm – achieving success in love and work.

And Hambly perfectly captures his decline at the hands of his Golem as he naively and unwittingly falls into a technological trap of online dating and mass market brainwashing.

Nathan Gregory is delightfully sinister as Golem creator Phil Sylocate and, almost simultaneously, wonderfully pompous as Robert’s colleague Julian.

But what sets Golem apart is the direction of Suzanne Andrade and the film and animation of Paul Barritt. The performance, which runs at The Playhouse until Saturday, is lit entirely by the single projector which screens a film behind the cast, who show impeccable timing to interact with the backdrop, from the streets of a red light district to Robert’s home, his workplace and the local boozer.

Barritt’s designs have a haunting quality about them, a mixture of 1950s Britain and the years of austerity of more recent times.

The future, it would seem, is Golem.

5/5