The Ethics of Progress
Southwark Playhouse, London

PHYSICS is the new reality televison – everywhere you look, there are programmes about nuclear particles, discussions about the CERN Antiproton Decelerator and various other peeks into the strange world of subatomic life. Now Unlimited Theatre has come up with a show, the tantalisingly entitled The Ethics of Progress, which, in the words of the hype, is “a mind-melting, jargon-free, whistle-stop tour of leading-edge quantum physics”.

In fact, the piece is a lecture by Unlimited Theatre’s artistic director (or should that be chief boffin?) Jon Spooner on the subject of nuclear physics and how the latest(ish) insights into the subatomic world may affect us all in the future.

First, Spooner outlines two theoretical suppositions: superposition, which is something being in two places at once; and entanglement, which is two separate bodies acting in the same way.

Using these ideas, Spooner then performs a thought experiment by imagining how, in the near future, these ideas might result in technology which will be able to teleport objects and eventually human beings around the world. Then he introduces the ethical problems that follow from this new technology. If, in order to be teleported, a human being has to be destroyed and then reconstituted in another place, is this the same human being?

If you smash all the atoms of a person and then recreate all these atoms in another distant place, has anything been lost? At first, Spooner claims that this process might wipe out all of the person’s memory, although — if you take the process literally — there’s no reason for that to be the case. If memory and our individuality are just the result of brain chemicals, then these could surely be reconstituted with perfection.

But would anything else be lost in this teleportation? One minute, I’m in London; the next, I’m in Sydney. Am I still the same person? Have I lost that supernatural part of me called the soul? Am I less authentic because the atoms that are me are not exactly the same atoms I had before I was teleported? Would my lovers and friends have any reason to complain that the teleported me was not the real me?

From all this, there also follows the political dimension: who would own the technology, and how would they control it? Well, you don’t have to be clairvoyant to guess the answer to that one. How much would it all cost? And would future wars depend on teleporting soldiers to foreign bases and using this power to overwhelm less technically advanced peoples? Yes, surely that is already happening. Isn’t it?

The Ethics of Progress is a lovely example of charm theatre. Spooner, whose material was written by himself plus fellow company members Chris Thorpe and Clare Duffy, is a charming guide, both enthusiastic and self-deprecatory, and his powerpoint presentation is neat and has an appealing, well, charm. Inspired by Professor Vlatko Vedral of Leeds University, the show is as pacey, provocative and informative as any lecture.

As a piece of theatre, however, it’s neither as imaginative nor as wonderful as the best science on stage. It’s not a patch on, for example, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen. Unlimited Theatre has some good material, but the form the company uses is entertaining rather than mind-blowing. Sometimes, being charming is simply not enough.

Aleks Sierz