On Ego

Soho Theatre in London, UK, until 7 January 2006.

What is this phenomenon that we call our sense of self? Is it the secular equivalent of the soul? Or is it just loops of wiring within the wet, grey stuff of our brains? Inspired by neuropsychologist Paul Broks' book Into the Silent Land (Atlantic, 2003), theatre director Mick Gordon examines this dilemma in his new play On Ego.

Who am I? Alex (Elliot Levey) searches for a sense of self. Credit: M. HARLEN

The play opens with a lecture by a neurologist, Alex, who explains why the mass of neurons behind the face annihilates the myth of the soul. Equipped with slides of scalpels probing brain tissue, and a dripping human brain lifted from a bucket, he argues that the self is no more than an aggregate of an individual's thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions.

To make his point — that the ‘I’ is an illusion, and that we are no more than bundles of information — Alex enters a teleportation machine that vaporizes his physical body. The procedure involves scanning every atom of his body and transmitting the information by radio waves to a new destination. It should automatically eliminate the original Alex, but it goes wrong, leaving two versions, who immediately start acquiring different experiences and memories. When faced with the prospect of being eradicated, however, his original ‘self’ resists and an intuitive sense that he is an ‘I’ after all kicks in with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, the duplicate Alex is unaware of his status and carries on as normal. But as the play proceeds he finds himself rejected by his wife, Alice, who is struck down with the psychological disorder Capgras' syndrome — a condition that makes her believe that her husband is an impostor.

Physical duplication dances with illusion and delusion. Just as Alice's perception of Alex changes, so does his perception of himself. The original Alex is confronted with two polar views of himself: his objective scientific view and his subjective view as he reacts to his experiences.

The many layers of the play, which stretches from the fantastical to a chilling portrayal of lives blighted by brain disease, is saved from chaos by being anchored to a carefully thought-out philosophical discussion about the nature of the self. While Alice struggles with her loss of self through lost love, her husband — and the audience — are left contemplating the space between what we rationally think we are and what we intuitively believe ourselves to be.

The stripping back of illusions to reveal the true self has long been the fodder of dramatists — think of King Lear peeling off his robes in the wind and the rain to reveal the “bare, forked animal” beneath. But in pushing against the boundaries of science, Gordon creates a tale that is both disturbing and curiously liberating. Perhaps we will never succeed in scientifically stripping back the intuitive sense of self, and perhaps, as Broks says, this is the “beautiful paradox” of being a human trying to understand itself.