REVIEW: THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE WATSON INTELLIGENCE By Madeleine George at Rosemary Branch 28 Oct - 1 Nov
‘intriguing and engaging’ ★★★
In a world more interconnected than it’s ever been, how is it that people stay lonely? One of the many questions implicitly asked in a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist play that makes connections across three centuries via three men and a machine all named Watson.
It's a tricksy, playful, meta script. Douglas Adams’s entirely untrustworthy private eye/shyster Dirk Gently used solemnly to intone the fundamental interconnectedness of all things to his clients when he couldn’t explain what he was billing them for. Here, it’s the audience who spend a happy pre-interval 80 minutes confused by what can possibly connect the leaps in time and location until things fall more into focus in the play’s second half.
The basic plot, deeply buried, is the marriage break-up of Eliza (Hanna Luna) and Merrick (Brandon Burke). She retreats into creating Watson (Hugo Linton), an artificial intelligence prototype (this was written in the early 2010s), while he runs for political office in an attempt to regain some significance. But there are other Elizas and Merricks in the stream of history, two of them caught in a late 19th century Sherlock Holmes story in which Dr Watson (Linton again) seeks to solve mysterious marks on Eliza’s skin. And two more ‘Watsons’ flicker into the lives of the Elizas and Lintons – a computer dweeb who’s helping modern Merrick is hired to tail his separated wife only to form a relationship with her, and the 19th century Mr Watson who has a real historical cameo in being the first person to receive a phone call from Alexander Graham Bell.
Confused? You will be, but the intricate workings of the play are well worth your concentration, not least because there are so many ideas being played with, you’ll never catch them all. The invention of the telephone’s a crucial starting point in our development of an electronic world: where Bell and his Mr Watson managed a call from one room to the next, we can now speak to any part of the world instantaneously. And the mischievousness of the playwright’s there in her creation of the four Watsons, too – Dr Watson is, of course, fictional, while Mr Watson is, of course, a real historical figure of whom we know little, and Watson the computer geek is ‘real’ but fictionally created for the play, and Watson, the artificial intelligence machine, both real and unreal, humane and inhuman.
Pick of the performances comes from Brandon Burke, especially in the scene where he visibly transforms from the modern bitter husband to 19th century crazed inventor. He finds an energy, variety and rhythm that bring out the playfulness of the script. The set’s clever, too – multiple spaces well designed and differentiated in a small stage that needs to cover a lot of time and space. Overall, though, the show could do with more range in pace and tone – it’s composed of quite long scenes and while the transitions between them are beautifully handled so that we’re always clear where we are, there’s an absence of variety and sometimes energy in the way they play out. The tendency to play each scene in much the same style obscures much of the humour in the lines.
In the end, though, intriguing, engaging and an array of ideas that keep you asking questions long after you’ve left the theatre.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE WATSON INTELLIGENCE
By Madeleine George
Directed by Julie Drake for 5go Theatre Co.
Rosemary Branch 28 October to 1 November 2025 (and Drayton Arms 14 to 18 October)
Box Office: https://www.rosemarybranchtheatre.co.uk/shows
David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, Brockley, London) and Murdering the Truth (Greenwich Theatre, London).
