When, at a dramatic peak, the lead character is running for her life and she’s teetering on a perilously tiny walkway on the outside of a very tall building, and terrified, certain thoughts shouldn’t be occurring to an audience. Chief among them is, “But she’s only about ten feet from the floor.” Our heroine may be scarily disengaged from everything she thought she knew, but we need to be fully invested. That we rarely are is the overwhelming problem with this strongly designed but tension-free adaptation of “Minority Report.”
In this gender-switched stage version not of Steven Spielberg’s movie but Philip K. Dick’s original short story, the crucial workings of the chilling, over-arching scenario are delivered by anti-heroine Julia Anderton (spiky Jodie McNee) in an opening lecture-demonstration.
We’re in 2050 and neuroscientist Julia is celebrating the tenth anniversary of her Pre-Crime Program which, via the implanting of chips in the brains of the population, has wiped out all crimes by arresting people before they commit them. To display the workings of this to us, the invited audience, she prints out the name of the next person to be arrested. To her horror, the name she reads is her own.
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In its defense, front-loading the show with this necessary exposition is far better than forcing characters to (over)explain to one another what they already know. Adaptor David Haig thus ushers in the all-important politics of the piece. At the same time, director Max Webster uses it to kick off his expertly controlled blending of video (Tal Rosner), lighting (Jessica Hung Han Yun) and sound (Nicola T. Chang) across Jon Bausor’s set — the star of the show — with immensely effective projections racing across screens and the towering, receding, multi-purpose mesh rectangles on either side of the stage.
What happens to Julia for the rest of the story is basically “The Fugitive” with added sci-fi morality. The race is on for her to prove her innocence against and, dangerously within, her own system. But not only is time against her, the speed of this telling as she rushes from location to location means the added contemporary philosophical musings of the script (about how it relates to troubles in 2024) are too schematic.
She argues — with ever-increasing shouting replacing atmosphere — with everyone she comes into contact with but the script renders every character as a one-note cipher. The government official is suited and suitably platitudinous; the American businesswoman, all no-lapels-no-mercy, has few words but every one of them is business-speak cliché. The result is that the audience remains fatally disconnected with almost everything discussed but not dramatized.
Webster muddies the waters still further with elements that confuse the visual style. The design achieves a near “Blade Runner” vibe, but chase sequences are so overly stylized that they feel like contemporary dance. Jeopardy plummets.
Haig’s attempt at giving the plot a motivating backstory via the death, years ago, of Julia’s twin sister, makes intellectual sense but fails because pinning psychological motivation to a character only ever seen once in a photograph fails to captivate the audience. And, most oddly, the crucial reveal of the horror at the center of the story — the upsetting “pre-cogs,” individuals trapped and forced to assess the population’s brain patterns — is weakly designed and goes for nothing.
It’s no one’s fault that this appears just months after Stephen Daldry’s sensational “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” which is such a design masterpiece that it makes spectacle respectable. For horror and theatrical thrills it leaves “Minority Report” standing. Sad to say, it’s hard to resist the conclusion: Great tech; shame about the show.
