DEEPFAKE
Sadler’s Wells East
★★★★★
“thrilling, meticulously choreographed theatre”
“Recollections may vary.” The phrase returns at the beginning of DEEPFAKE, gradually fractured and restructured. It sounds like a disclaimer, but also a warning: if memory can shift and testimony can be reconstructed, what makes an image any more trustworthy? Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells Theatre and DanceEast, and created and directed by Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple, the production builds a political thriller around an increasingly uncomfortable television interview.
The stage is strikingly minimal. Green surrounds the playing space in Milla Clarke’s set, immediately establishing it as a site of fabrication rather than a completed fictional world. Once the live camera and Dan Light’s video design enter the equation, that emptiness is transformed. Rebecca Bassett-Graham’s cool-headed journalist Katie Fielding steadily corners Kennedy Muntanga’s Prime Minister as he attempts to explain a mysterious disappearance from Buckingham Palace. Muntanga moves between polished confidence and physical unease with impressive control, while Bassett-Graham gives the interview a precise, increasingly adversarial tension.
The use of live camera on stage is hardly new. What makes the work distinctive is how completely its technology is bound to its dramaturgy. As the Prime Minister reconstructs the missing twenty-four minutes, his live body exists alongside competing screen versions of the past. Recorded bodies appear beside present ones; dancers and digital avatars connect with remarkable precision. Memory becomes less a stable event than material available for editing. At its most visually overwhelming, performers move through six screen-like panels until it becomes difficult to identify where the live body ends and projection begins. Here, technology does not simply illustrate uncertainty; it makes uncertainty physically felt.
This is where the choreography becomes particularly compelling. A theatre audience normally performs its own continuous edit: we decide where to look, whether to focus on a gesture or the entire stage picture. A camera makes those decisions for us. Jess & Morgs place both systems of spectatorship in front of us simultaneously. The camera becomes not simply a witness to choreography, but a choreographic force in its own right. The gimbal operator and green-screen performers remain visible, so even the labour of constructing the illusion becomes part of the choreography. At rare moments, the sheer virtuosity of the screen work risks competing with the emotional stakes of the interview, though the performers quickly pull our attention back.
Jeff James’ writing and dramaturgy keep the production grounded. Political satire, interrogation and absurdity sit alongside one another without collapsing into simple comedy. Voiceover further separates body from statement, so that what we hear, what we see and who appears to be speaking no longer perfectly align. The dancers sustain this instability with exacting physical control, while the central performances prevent the technological apparatus from becoming an end in itself.
The production does not need to tell us that images can lie. Its more unsettling question is how an image comes to feel true in the first place. Its technology is not decoration; it is dramaturgy. By the end, the issue is no longer simply whether a politician is telling the truth, but where spectators are supposed to locate truth at all. Jess & Morgs turn the instability of the image into thrilling, meticulously choreographed theatre.
DEEPFAKE
Sadler’s Wells East
Reviewed on 1st October 2026
by Portia Yuran Li
Photography by Foteini Christofilopoulou
