Way back in 1995, Bill Gates wrote: “someday we’ll be able to record everything we see and hear”. Today that prognostication is a fact of life that most of us take for granted. Bluepatch and Floating World’s production of Oh Look, Hummingbirds takes that once-radical notion to a fascinating and disturbing extreme: what if we could actually experience a recorded log of memories of someone we loved?

While it has all the makings of a potentially intriguing sci-fi film, Oh Look, Hummingbirds makes for a rather uneven piece of theatre. It’s stymied by its unusual conceit: the audience is not an audience but a group of invited guests to ‘The Park’, a space-age medical centre operated by three doctors who speak like automatons (Aoife Connolly, Cliona de Bri and Sarah Anne Clarke) and aim to provide psychological metamorphosis via a sort of multimedia memory immersion. Planted in the audience is Georgie (Andrea Scott), a journalist, offered the chance to visualise the memories of a deceased ex-boyfriend.

While writer Ruth Lysaght’s fixation with the problems of memory, and thus humanity, in a digital age where it is theoretically possible to archive every split second of existence, is both worthy and substantiated beautifully by Furry’s beautiful ‘livelogging’ film interludes, Oh Look, Hummingbirds never quite takes flight.

Star rating: ★★★