Lichentongue

There are only so many things that can be reasonably done in an hour. Unfortunately no-one seems to have informed Pericles Snowdon, the playwright behind Lichentongue – a production which suffers terribly for having bitten off a lot more than it can chew.

Kicking off in a TV studio, chat-show host Thora Lichentongue is conducting the interview from hell with computer scientist Barang Lal, who is demonstrating the capacities of the world's most advanced artificial intelligence programme. Out of this interview, through the most unlikely of "logical progressions", comes a revelation which threatens the career of the eponymous host.

Building upon the implications of this scene, Lichentongue quickly descends into a series of cod-philosophical musings on the place of art in the computer age, on the implications for privacy when software is built that can read minds and on the fickleness of contemporary show-business. However, so brief is the flirtation with any of these issues that Lichentongue can often feel more like a list of things the newspapers are complaining about than an engaging portrayal of serious ideas.

Worse still is the Thora Lichentongue character herself, whose response to almost any situation is to lash out in anger. Her reactionary luddism is deeply unsympathetic and her aggression towards other characters seems largely unjustified. More offensively still, her lesbianism seems tacked on almost as a means to explain away her abrasiveness in such a way as to pander to traditional stereotyping of gay women.

This is a production that is shallow, reactionary in outlook and all-to-often desperately ill-informed.