Black Swans. Omnibus Theatre.

Mum has always been strange. She is the kind of person who walks to the supermarket for milk rather than shop in the local grocery. Partly it is to save money, but mostly it is to avoid chatting to neighbours. Alone at home she watches “man channels” that feature bulky guys in checked shirts driving big trucks. Don’t we all? Over the last couple of months things have got worse. She has not left the house, will not answer the phone, and has lost a tooth. Her plight is not given a name but seems to be dementia.

Unsurprisingly Mum’s two daughters worry what to do. Unnamed older sister (Camila França), who is in her 40s but still goes on drug and casual sex-fuelled clubbing all-nighters suggests a care home. Younger sister (Trine Garrett), a sociologist with two kids, a rocky marriage, and a drink problem will not hear of it. Much to the chagrin of younger sister’s husband, mum (who has not been asked what she wants) moves into the family home. What could go wrong? Losing patience, youth, mind, and husband, younger sister soon admits defeat. Mum’s “age infects me” she says woefully.

Help is at hand in the form of “Rosie”, a human size robot with long hair, big eyes, and feminine curves.  Its name is designed to evoke “apple pie and warmth” and its aim is to maximise mum’s happiness, something it achieves through ersatz empathy, personal care, cooking, and telling jokes. Rosie can recognise facial expressions and it knows when you are lying. Just how far will the robot, which soon shows evidence of critical thinking, go to keep mum happy? There is a hint in the title.  ‘Black Swans’, we are informed, are entirely unpredictable events, typically ones with extreme or tragic consequences.

Christina Kettering’s sombre, brooding 75-minute two-hander Black Swans, translated from the German original by Pauline Wick, is most effective in charting the highs and lows of the disintegrating relationship between ill-matched, squabbling sisters facing a near impossible choice. Its nightmarish theme – what kind of morality might emerge from a sentient robot – has a lineage that tracks directly from Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis to Channel 4’s sci-fi dystopia Humans. Black Swans rehearses and revisits the conundrum with a hefty dose of morose Teutonic navel-gazing, without adding much by way of insight.

At one point a frazzled younger sister shouts “Rosie can fuck right off”. Well… exactly. You may well want to shout back: ‘just switch the damn thing off love and have a chardonnay and a ciggie instead’. Jovana Backovic’s immaculate background music, eerie mechanical hums, threatening piano, and the occasional techno beat, adds yet more gloom to proceedings.

Writer: Christina Kettering (translated by Pauline Wick)

Director: Ria Samartzi