On Ego is a lecture that turns into a nightmare. An amiable young neurologist, Alex, strolls on stage and addresses us on the subject of mind. He has a lab technician Derek (Robin Soans wearing a white coat and a lost gaze), who presents him with a bucket containing a brain. Alex picks up the dripping ‘lump of meat’ and uses it to illustrate Francis Crick’s observation that ‘Conscious experience is not caused by the behaviour of neurons. It is the behaviour of neurons.’ The show then evolves, by a series of sudden shifts and jerks, from a monologue into a drama. Derek the lab assistant turns out to be more talented than he first appeared. He’s invented a ‘teleporter’, which vaporises the body and reconstitutes it somewhere else, just like the device operated by Scottie on Star Trek. He persuades Alex to travel by ‘teleporter’ to meet his wife for dinner at a London restaurant. This seems a rash move, even with the congestion charge at £8, and sure enough the teleporter fails. Alex arrives at the restaurant a day early. At least I think that’s what happened. His wife Alice, meanwhile, suffers a mental collapse, possibly from the shock of seeing her husband materialise from nowhere in a crowded trattoria. She winds up in an asylum unable to remember the word for finger. After this, Derek, who turns out to be her father, enlists Alex in a doomed bid to rescue Alice’s fragmenting sanity and the show cranks itself up into a wildly emotional climax.
This is an ambitious failure, an attempt to blend science fantasy and philosophical debate, but it veers off into rowdy melodrama. The author, Paul Broks, is at ease discussing neurological theory but less comfortable creating characters and assembling a plausible story.
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