THE LAZARUS LOTTERY
BATS Theatre, The Heyday Dome, 1 Kent Tce, Wellington
23/08/2018 - 01/09/2018
Production Details
An ethical dilemma for our times
If you had a terminal illness, would you, for your loved ones, allow a clone to replace you once you’re dead? Eve did. Some people aren’t happy.
The Lazarus Lottery is a thought-provoking play by new Christchurch playwright James van Dyk. A 2018 Adam NZ Play Award finalist, it comes to BATS Theatre, Wellington.
The play is set in the not-too-distant-future and centres on Eve, a terminally ill young woman, who wins the titular lottery. Soon to die, she will now have samples taken from her and a clone will be grown to match her age. Not only will it look exactly as she does now but it will also have all of her memories up until a month before she passes. The new Eve will step right into place of the old Eve. For her it will seem like she has (almost) never been away. This seems like the perfect answer. Or is it?
At the start of the play we are introduced to Eve (Ivana Palezevic) and her devoted young husband David (James Cain). Eve’s best friend and old school mate Rachel (Greer Phillips) isn’t so sure about what is to happen. Rachel has stayed with the church and finds it difficult to take on board – will this human-made creation have a soul?
Damien Fitzroy (Alex Grieg) has hosted the Lazarus Lottery for the three years it has been running. But now, as some clones are rejected by their loved ones, he’s beginning to have second thoughts. It used to be about the money, but now he is seeing that it doesn’t always end up ‘happy ever after’. Creator of the Lazarus Lottery, Professor Florian Kilbury (Ralph Johnson) is certain that this is a boon, and that people’s inability to accept clones is simply a matter of perception – they are, for all intents and purposes, that person! The only fair way to use this cloning technology is by the random chance of a lottery, restricting it to the terminally ill so that it’s use won’t overwhelm the ecosystem.
And then of course, Eve arrives home…
By the end, perhaps each will have discovered that their beliefs and expectations are not what they thought they would be.
The Lazarus Lottery features a stellar Wellington cast – Alex Grieg, Greer Phillips, Ivana Palezevic, James Cain and Ralph Johnson. It is designed by Michael Trigg and led by award winning Director Patrick Davies.
On Tuesday 28th of August, there will be a panel discussion after the show, on the issues raised in The Lazarus Lottery facilitated by RNZ’s Lynn Freeman with special guests including Professor Nick Agar of Victoria University of Wellington’s Philosophy Department. Admission is free with a ticket to the show. Be prepared for some interesting insights into current bio-ethical thinking and some observations and thoughts on where we’re all headed in the future of our race.
BATS Theatre The Heyday Dome
Thurs 23rd August – Sat 1st September 2018
6:00pm
BOOK: https://bats.co.nz/whats-on/the-lazarus-lottery/
Theatre ,
1hr 30m (no interval)
Existential and metaphysical quandaries explored through very human experiences
Review by John Smythe 24th Aug 2018
Billed as “an ethical dilemma for our times” James van Dyk’s The Lazarus Lottery is named for the way people with terminal diseases may choose to compete for a chance to be cloned at their current age and stage with their same DNA and memories – apart from what happened during the unpredictable time between the harvesting and their death.
The play begins during that in-between time. Indeed as we file into BATS’ Heyday Dome, 32 year-old Eve is languishing on the couch while her husband David reads to her from Homer’s The Iliad. Directed with great sensitivity by Patrick Davies, Ivana Palezevic and James Cain draw us in to their deep devotion as their healthily robust interactions convey the paradox of their situation: she is dying but has won the lottery so their life together will, in due course, resume.
Meanwhile they banter about the rush of concern for her on social media, where the lavender should grow in the garden and David’s fusty ‘old man’ traits, including his growing obsession with cryptic crosswords, which his granddad apparently conquered with ease.
These heartwarming domestic scenes are punctuated with bits of a public lecture from Professor Florian Kilbury, creator of the Lazarus Lottery, and his wholehearted advocacy is strongly delivered by Ralph Johnson. While he speaks to the various concerns people have raised, the person who challenges Eve directly is her friend from way-back, Rachel Godwin. They were inseparable through puberty and adolescence but have lost touch in recent years, not least because Rachel’s evangelical Christianity has alienated Eve.
Greer Phillips embodies Rachel’s concerns heart and soul – and the question of ‘soul’ is central to her impassioned arguments. Rachel also takes to the podium to proselytise but it is her interactions with Eve that are more compelling dramatically as we sense a shift in Eve’s position.
The fifth character, brought to charming life by Alex Grieg, is Damien Fitzroy who has hosted the Lazarus Lottery – live on screen, I assume – for the three years it’s been running but has now resigned, although he continues to take a personal interest in the lottery’s winners. Over the play’s time-frame, he reclaims his role as a journalist and subjects both Prof Kilbury and Ms Godwin to rigorous TV interviews.
Special mention must be made of the later scenes where Ivana Palezevic brings Eve back to exuberant life, as her clone. It’s a great transition and ups the ante as we in the audience continue to grapple the ethical, social and spiritual dilemmas the play presents.
The excellent lighting design by Michael Trigg, who also operates the lighting and stings from appropriate songs, facilitates the dynamic pacing and well-focused flow of the production. Full credit to Patrick Davies and his team for committing fully to presenting what I take to be the version of James van Dyk’s play that was a finalist in the 2018 Adam NZ Play Award.
Given it was first produced by the University of Canterbury’s Dramsoc in February 2016, directed by van Dyk with a cast of 10 – double the size of this iteration – it has clearly undergone a radical rewrite. And I feel it needs more work. By crossing and dotting every proverbial ‘t’ and ‘i’, van Dyk renders his script less dramatic than it could be. Because all the ethical dilemmas are flagged early on, and repeated a number of times, there is little surprise in what ensues. Eve and David are experiencing what we’ve already been told has troubled other ‘winners’.
The decision to set the play three years down the track means I can’t help but wonder why conventional funeral rituals are still in play and not being superseded by a more suitable transition ceremony. And while the question of whether a clone has a soul is raised more than once, it seems odd to me that there is no mention at all of ‘the life hereafter’/ ‘everlasting life’/ ‘the promise eternal life’ – surely that is totally ‘on topic’ for both sides of the debate.
That said, this production of The Lazarus Lottery offers an opportunity to engage with existential and metaphysical quandaries while empathetically sharing the very human experiences of people we come to care about.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
Comments