Clutching at AI Straws “…as long as the fiction holds.” Raquel MyAnna Buring as Merril and Dakota Blue Richards as Angie. (Photo: The Other Richard) It is a bleak, bare set: …
This exceptional new play by Matilde Dratwa, who was born in Belgium but who now lives in New York, juxtaposes the mega event regime change of the advent of the Trump presidency with the micro in world terms of the birth of Vera (MyAnna Buring)'s first child. Of course for Vera, this birth is anything but micro as her life is turned upside down by the new arrival and responsibility for him. As Vera goes into labour with the supportive father of her child, Michael (Matt Whitchurch) in attendance, it is November 2016 and the states are being called either for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
This action by Russian agents (the KGB or their successors, the FSB) is the suspected second prominent murder case on British soil, the first known about being the murder of Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov in 1978 with a ricin poisoned pellet shot from an umbrella. The latest in 2018 took place in the sleepy West Country cathedral city of Salisbury when Novichoc a nerve agent was smeared on the door handle of Sergei Skripal's house putting Mr Skripal, his daughter Yulia and a local policeman into hospital and killing another English woman whose partner found the perfume bottle containing the nerve agent.