EDINBURGH 2026 Review: A BETTER MEMORY, Pleasance Courtyard
Runs until 30 August.
A year after her husband’s death, Eleanor keeps active and religiously attends her life-drawing classes. Her younger friend Mia, whom she took under her wing after she moved to Scotland, is now urging her to turn to an AI agent that holds all of Harold’s experience. After all, Mia has an AI boyfriend, and it’s going so well. She genuinely believes Eleanor could benefit from the help. Ihsan Kerr asks: what are we willing to lose in an attempt to move on? Co-directed by Kerr with Kathryn Marper (also Mia), A Better Memory is a sombre, melancholic play.
Generally profound, it does, however, feature random tangents that completely derail its tone. It’s easy to see that these silly, backhanded swerves (like the television series they’re watching, about a toaster who falls in love) are written to lighten the mood and add a hint of genre fluctuation, but they are to the detriment of its ultimate focus.
Lubna Kerr gives a heartbreaking performance as Eleanor. Composed and proper, she brightens up when she talks about her newfound passions after years of emotional neglect. Marper, on the other hand, is exuberant and excited, perhaps slightly too histrionic and melodramatic compared to Kerr. They are quite the dynamic duo, refusing to recognise the similarity of their circumstances until these slap them in the face.
The script itself introduces too many narrative devices to be subtle. In the first 15 minutes, a variety of Chekhov’s Guns is presented to us, and the whole plot unravels before it even kicks in. The show is nonetheless very interesting in its thematic line. With AI featuring in our lives more prominently with each update, the possibility that we could transfer someone’s personality into a robot is not too far-fetched. But is this palliative use of tech worth what we could discover in the remote alcoves of someone’s consciousness? Kerr knows what he’s doing; he just needs to be a little sharper about it.
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