Deepfake review – ingenious interview with a PM who dances around every issue

What audiences remember most from a political interview, a voiceover tells the prime minister (Kennedy Muntanga) as he prepares to face his TV interrogator (Rebecca Bassett-Graham, coiffed à la Emily Maitlis), is less the words themselves than the tone of voice and the tenor of the body. Muntanga is on point, then: his arms sweep, his fingers beetle and his hands spread out, as if he were wordlessly fielding fly-by questions and offering open statements. It’s the moves and the staging that count.

This setup lands right in the zone for creative duo Jess and Morgs (Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple), whose turf is a congenial mix of choreography, film and theatre. In Deepfake, along with writer Jeff James, they explore the various unravellings of an encounter in which the interviewer tries to find the truth behind a surreal – but maybe real? – story in which the PM was seen variously spattered with yellow paint, with his flies undone, and partaking in a ritual involving a deer’s head.

The content of these scenarios perhaps matters less than the ingenious manner of their staging (props to the design team too), which deploys green screen, live relay and other film and stage effects to storify the interview with simulated settings, duplicates of the figure of the PM, selective perspectives and closeups of the central encounter. Spidering about the main characters and manipulating the sets are a team of seven dancers in green body stockings, anonymously blending into the background but integral to the whole media matrix.

Initially the tone is paranoid and conspiratorial, the dancers syncing to voiceovers that then start to glitch (a signature device of works by Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young). There are ambiguous, unvoiced duets which intimate, intriguingly, that interviewer and interviewee may not only be playing the same game of moves and countermoves, but might sometimes even be on the same side. Later, the piece starts shifting gears, swerving through farce, parody (there’s some delightful and very unexpected play with 19th-century ballet), absurdism, and ultimately a kind of comic bathos, equally unexpected.

It’s inventive, clever, exactly executed and quite a lot of fun, but the tone is also scattershot, and the piece ends up feeling more lightweight than its deepfake premise had promised – as if it wasn’t quite convinced by its own story.