BRAINS AND HOW TO MAKE THEM USEFUL
Clearly it is the mission of Hampstead Downstairs to broaden our education, no bad ambition. Not long ago I learned a lot about the life and emotional feelings of octopi down there, and now Jonathan Spector’s strange engrossing three-player brainstorm takes us into a philosphy lecturer’s world of analysing the different ways knowledge hits the human awareness and how we process it. There are three kinds of heuristic response ( philosophese for common sense and experience), plus confirmation-bias , overconfidence bias (Liztrussitis) and anchoring and experience biases, as widely found in newspaper columns, hem-hem, say no more.
Our lean and bright-eyed lecturer hero Lukesh (Esh Alladi is , as ever, enchantingly watchable) demonstrates this stuff with pictures and a peach (later it turns out he does conjuring too, as all good psychological philosophers should). But something is amiss. His wife Natalya (Natalie Klamar) has suddenly announced she’s off, not his fault, just off: and the next he knows of her is a call from a train across Russia. He suspects himself of hitting on the wrong heuristic by thinking she had got over a car crash she was in earlier (lots of flashback’n forward) but in fact she is trying to find out whether her grandmother, or possibly great-grandmother, was murdered by Stalin even though her best friend was his daughter Svetlana, who could have (might have) pleaded for her. Oh, and meanwhile poor Lukesh is having to supervise the PhD of a student from a white-supremacist family – : Oscar Adams playing nicely hapless and selfrighteous, forever explaining to the patient Indian academic how he’s not a Nazi really and it’s nothing personal, and how it’ all in HG Wells’ The Time Machine because we need Morlocks and Elois, or possibly not) .
Well, no further spoilers, because you’ll enjoy the ride, remember this man Spector gave us the fabulous Eureka Day at the Old Vic; and Chelsea Walker directs with commendable speed and use of the tech. But both Klamar and Adams move between characters, undisguised at a breakneck pace, she often taking us through Svetlana’s sudden defection in 1967. Footage of Stalin coheres sometimes with the white-supremacist Dad, neatly making a point about similarity and the general absurdity of tidy extremes in dealing with untidy humanity. And Esh Alladi remains always beguiling, whether his mode of each moment is tutorial, irritated, or maritally baffled.
And Natalya’s vodka scene with Adams (temporarily an aged and venal Soviet archivist) is a proper treat. You won’t regret it. More fun than the Stoppard upstairs, actually.
Box office hampsteadtheatre.com. to 27 January
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