Anna Burnside reviews a production with ‘a timely and important subject’.
The entryphone buzzes insistently in a sock and pizza box-strewn flat. A grumpy Henry emerges in his pants and answers the door to a female android that we soon discover has been made in the image of his ex-girlfriend Liz.
She has, she proudly yet robotically announces, 100 adjustable settings and 12 new features.
Using many of them, the pair relitigate old arguments, kiss and discover that free trials can end at the most awkward times.
Lara Bates’s book, The New Age of Sexism, inspired Amy Conway to explore the place where AI meets the male loneliness epidemic. It asks a lot of its two stars: Henry takes many emotional twists and turns, few of them flattering. And Liz has to cope with, well, 100 adjustable settings and 12 new features.
Sam Stopford is tremendous as the crumpled and defeated Henry, still devastated by Liz’s departure eight years ago. He zigzags between bewilderment, rage and exasperation, unsure whether to disable Liz’s settings or rip her clothes off.
Anna Russell-Martin starts strongly as Liz, jerking mechanically in her PVC frock and boots. But director Ben Standish struggles to differentiate between her different modes, meaning her character is too inconsistent to be convincing.
Feel_Good has a really good play in there somewhere. It’s a timely and important subject, ideal for a theatrical treatment. But it’s not there yet, veering between cyberfarce, romcom and dramatic exploration of the practical and ethical implications of humanising machines. The ending, after a lot of plot shoehorned into the last 10 minutes, feels unresolved.
The actors do their best with the script, but Standish fails to carve out clean lines and to elevate the show beyond high tech sex comedy.
Feel_Good performs at Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and A Pint until 19 September 2026. For further details, go to the company’s website.
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