Last Updated on October 3, 2026
The Award-Winning Duo Mash Dance and Technology in Deepfake
4.0 out of 5.0 stars“All the world’s information is in the palm of your hand, and you can’t believe a word of it”, says one of the lead characters in Deepfake, the latest multimedia dance-theatre work by the exciting duo Jess & Morgs. It’s a comment that should resonate with anybody who, faced with the flurry of stories, real and fake, memes and posts in their social media, no longer knows how to separate fact from fiction. Here that confusion is framed as an interview between star TV journalist Katie Fielding (Rebecca Bassett-Graham) and the Prime Minister (Kennedy Muntanga), whose story unravels as the interview goes on.
Jess & Morgs, the stage name of Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple, are some of the most creative, daring and genuinely original people working in the UK performing arts today. Award-winning directors, choreographers and filmmakers, they’ve been working together for 15 years, gaining commissions for an increasing number of established companies, such as Scottish Ballet, for whom they developed a full reworking of the delightful, but a little twee, 19th century ballet Coppelia, to create a thought-provoking ballet for our technology-mad times. It went on to win the 2023 UK Theatre Award for Achievement in Dance and the Critics Circle National Dance Award for Best Classical Choreography.
Jess & Morgs’ Deepfake manages to keep the audience on their toes throughout its 60 minutes’ duration, trying to work out what’s true and what’s not, as the Prime Ministe chops and changes, tries and fails to gain control of the narrative, his sang-froid, fairly flimsy to start with, gradually abandoning him altogether under the interviewer’s persistent questioning. He was 24 minutes late for a state banquet at Buckingham Palace – where exactly was he?
The set, by Milla Clark who also designed the costumes, starts off as a wide green space, above which hangs a large screen. Seven figures in top to toe green, which allows them to blend in to the point of invisibility, work hard both moving, placing and replacing bits of scenery, and also performing their own dance interludes. We first see the Prime Minister, pacing nervously, hands clutching head, as a voice over instructs him on how to control the interview. As he takes his place across from the interviewer, their images are projected onto the screen, placing the interview within a virtual image of a Downing Street interior.
Through the seamless blend of on-stage performance, live action film and recorded footage, and profuse voice overs, Jess & Morgs’ Deepfake gives the audience access not only to the actual interview, but also to the thoughts of the protagonists, as well as to film that purports to show the Prime Minister in a compromising situation during the 24 minutes in question, his face contorted in fear, his suit stained, flies undone. Is it real, or, as the anguished Prime Minister claims, a deepfake?
Just like in modern life, the viewers’ attention is claimed by a variety of simultaneous happenings, with the central figures duplicated or even triplicated, appearing and disappearing through the set.
Our eyes, then, strain to distinguish real people from their filmed images, even as we try to make sense of the claims and counterclaims and guess the truth. It’s really very clever and intensely de nos jours; and the truth, when it’s finally revealed, proves an anticlimax, as it so often does.
In order to work and grip its audience, though, Jess & Morgs’ Deepfake needs convincing performers, and in Rebecca Bassett-Graham and Kennedy Muntanga it has the best. Rebecca Bassett-Graham, now a member of Studio Wayne McGregor, is a remarkable contemporary dancer and a good stage actress, too, her implacable interviewer unmoved by the PM’s growing distress. Kennedy Muntanga is excellent as the increasingly frenzied politician; and the supporting cast of seven, all students of the Central School of Ballet, work and dance like true pros. Kudos, too, to the technical team, too numerous for individual mention, and to writer and dramaturg Jeff James, who drafted an uncommonly clear and cohesive narrative.
Jess & Morgs. Deepfake is a Sadler’s Wells East 1 – 3 October at 7.30 pm
Dur.: 1 hour no interval. Tickets: £15 – £45
Sadler’s Wells E
Stratford Walk
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
London E20 2AR
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