“Bridget is there”: Accelerating the Cybernetic Subject in Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman’s More Life

This article examines the accelerated dramaturgy of More Life (2025) by Lauren Mooney and James Yeatman through a posthuman lens. First produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London, Mooney and Yeatman’s text ironically foregrounds embodiment through taking a cybernetic approach to dramatic form: splitting its protagonist’s body and mind across two actors and manipulating the unfolding action to mirror the speed and simultaneity of concurrent computer processing. Cybernetic culture, according to Katherine Hayles, produces a subjectivity unique to the digital age, in which the human is defined by the logic of the intelligent machine, even within a biologically-unaltered present. Through accelerating the logic of the cybernetic subject, More Life interrogates the embodied implications of the transhumanist fantasy, by anchoring the play’s speculative plot in the materially felt consequences of the here and now.