Girl in the Machine review – the dilemmas of digital dependency

Traverse, Edinburgh
Stef Smith's dystopian sci-fi two-hander, staged during the Edinburgh international science festival, anatomises our relationships with technology

The lines of Neil Warmington's set are straight and enclosing. The shipping-container walls roll back to reveal an oblong room where four cushioned cubes sit between the right angles of the Escher-like flooring and the squares of the grating above. It's a chic space where married couple Owen and Polly can look cool and sophisticated. Naturally, when he surprises her with a present, it comes wrapped in a neat black box.

But we all know about square pegs and round holes. In Stef Smith's gripping two-hander, a piece of dystopian sci-fi in the manner of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, flesh-and-blood humanity is not easily contained. Where Polly would like to take refuge in the rectangular screen of her tablet computer, with its constant email pings from her work in corporate law, she is pulled equally by the erotic force of her husband's real-life presence.