Scotland

A Better Memory – Pleasance Courtyard

There can hardly be two more different approaches to AI and bereavement at this year’s Fringe than An Echo in the Void and A Better Memory. Intriguingly, you can see them almost back to back, and as a theatrical double bill they make fascinating companions.

Where An Echo in the Void throws us headlong into the Matrix, asking us to grapple with neural networks, alternative realities and a future where 1.5 billion people have effectively disappeared inside an artificial world, A Better Memory brings everything back home.

Literally.

Ihsan Kerr’s new play is less psychological thriller than homespun domestic drama. Eleanor, played by Lubna Kerr, is a widow living with an Alexa-like device containing an AI reconstruction of her dead husband Harold, played by Codge Crawford. It is an immediately understandable proposition and, unlike An Echo in the Void, we know almost instantly where we are and what the rules are.

Crawford initially sits amongst the audience, physically giving voice to something Eleanor actually hears through a box. I think this is exactly the right theatrical decision. An electronic voice emanating from a speaker might be technically accurate, but having Harold physically present makes him increasingly real to us, just as this technology is becoming increasingly real to Eleanor.

And none of this is particularly far-fetched. Bereavement AI already exists, using stored recordings, messages and memories to construct increasingly convincing digital representations of the dead. The interesting question Kerr asks is what happens when we start digging around inside that memory bank.

Do the living have an automatic right to access everything the dead have left behind?

More troublingly, do we have the right to manipulate it?

If Eleanor doesn’t like a memory, should she be able to delete it? If Harold’s digital reconstruction remembers their marriage differently from her, whose version becomes the truth? The deceased cannot withdraw consent, correct the record or tell us simply to stop looking. Suddenly this apparently gentle domestic drama is asking some rather large questions about memory, ownership, agency and the rights of the dead.

There is also a parallel strand involving Mia, played by Kathryn Marper, whose relationship with AI comes from the opposite direction. Rather than using technology to maintain a relationship that has ended, she is using it to create one. Between them, the two women offer different but increasingly plausible versions of artificial intimacy.

For me, the weakness is not Kerr’s writing but aspects of its theatrical delivery. Lubna Kerr’s Eleanor is deliberately quiet and understated. I understand the choice. This is an intimate portrait of a widow, not someone who should suddenly start projecting to the back wall. We lean in towards her, and that intimacy has value. But we do still need to hear her.

The Green at Pleasance Courtyard, essentially a thin-walled, shipping-container-type theatre, doesn’t particularly help. External noise penetrates the space and occasionally competes with an already very quiet performance. There are also moments of considerable dramatic potential between the characters where I wanted stronger reactions and greater theatrical weight.

That is slightly ironic because An Echo in the Void, for all its complexity, arguably delivers the stronger performances. A Better Memory, however, has the advantage of immediacy. It takes similarly enormous ideas and places them somewhere utterly ordinary, in a room, with a widow talking to her dead husband.

Perhaps that is ultimately the more unsettling proposition.

AI doesn’t necessarily arrive by throwing us into the Matrix, it might simply appear quietly on the bedside table.

Playing until August 30th 2026, https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/2026BETTERM

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 18th August 2026

North West End UK / Theatre Muse UK Rating: