Deepfake review: Jess and Morgs' PM interview dances around its own — SkimNews
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- Deepfake is a dance-theatre work by creative duo Jess and Morgs (Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple) with writer Jeff James, staging an interview between a PM and a TV interrogator styled à la Emily Maitlis (played by Rebecca Bassett-Graham).
- The production deploys green screen, live relay and other film and stage effects to simulate settings, duplicate the PM and offer selective perspectives, with a design team credited alongside the seven dancers in green body stockings who manipulate sets and blend into the background.
- Reviewer notes the show cycles through paranoid, conspiratorial, farcical, parodic (including 19th-century ballet), absurdist and bathetic registers, using glitching voiceovers as a recurring device.
- Kennedy Muntanga's PM is framed in surreal scenarios — spattered with yellow paint, flies undone, and partaking in a ritual with a deer's head — with the interviewer probing whether the story is real.
- The verdict is that the piece is "inventive, clever, exactly executed and quite a lot of fun" but feels "more lightweight than its deepfake premise had promised," with a "scattershot" tone that undermines its own story.
Why it matters: For the creative team of Jess and Morgs, the production extends their established choreography-film-theatre hybrid onto a politically charged premise, but the reviewer's verdict — inventive staging paired with a scattershot tone — signals a missed opportunity to land the deepfake theme with real bite, which matters for a company positioning itself at the intersection of dance and media critique.
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