Lisa McMullin’s latest work Rapture raises challenging questions about the value of individuals’ lives in a world where continuing to sustain them all is the high price of civilisation broadly. It is 2063 and the country’s resources are dangerously overstretched, exacerbating the divide between the rich and poor. A government audit seeks to find out exactly what each individual is worth in order to decide where they might slim down the population, “for the greater good”. What begins as a bureaucratic exercise in an unremarkable municipal office unravels as something much more sinister and ideological, devised by a government unafraid of deconstructing intrinsic beliefs about our claims to equality. This dystopian future is recognisable as the end result of austerity politics and of celebrity culture, which makes the questions asked in the play engaging. However, the considerable scope of the premise ultimately swamps this small production.

The gradual exposure of the dark reality of the audit is well paced; Ryan Kennedy as The Auditor brings a controlled, rhetorical tone to the dialogue between all the characters, and his playful, cruel manner embodies that of the experiment in general. Other performers, however, are less well-suited to their respective characters, making certain interactions feel unnatural and strained. The familiar shabbiness of Cleo (the exhausted drama teacher) and Ossie (the hopeless bingo hall caller) are juxtaposed with Whitney, a global reality star, and Cameron, the unnerving, slippery independent MP. Their characters are both written and played to the extremes, which in a short production such as this obscures the universality of the script’s questions. At the point where their social reputations have been dismantled by the immediacy of the threat facing them, the nuances drawn out in their characters are thoughtful ones. Under the auditor’s difficult questioning, Whitney’s vanity and self-importance are acknowledged to be the result of injured self-esteem, and it is a pleasing moment at the end of the play when she is the only character to vote for somebody else’s right to carry on living. The nuances in Whitney’s and Cleo’s characters are drawn out too slowly, however, and elsewhere problems arise with the rewardless over-complication of Ossie’s character.

Over-complication is symptomatic of the play as a whole, which leaves the premise of the piece feeling incoherent at times. Certain aspects of the future setting are decisively dystopian; as the audit turns aggressive towards the civilians, they find they have been fitted with highly advanced chips tightly controlling their responses to each other’s answers. This is the play at its most imaginitave and playful, fully in keeping with the gameshow interpretation of the future. Yet other references to “breaking the internet” and Whitney having won Big Brother feel outdated even now, and absolutely anachronistic in the world of 2063. The staging of the script’s most futuristic aspects is inventive and tightly executed by the performers (and managed very smoothly on a simple set), making it a shame that the production is not so consistently daring. Not only were the most bold aspects of this production its strongest dramatically, but they were also the moments where the most pertinent questions about cruelty and individualism are drawn out effectively.

Rapture is playing at the Etcetera Theatre until the 26 June. For more information and tickets, see the Etcetera Theatre website.