California’s Pepperdine University Theater, through the Pepperdine Scotland project, are no strangers to the Fringe and have won a couple of Fringe Firsts in the past twenty years. This is a second collaboration with Scottish playwright Lynda Radley. Sadly this will not be adding a further Fringe First plaque to their trophy cabinet.

It’s an overambitious science fiction piece with a large student cast who don’t have the experience to realise the subtleties of playing AI androids and age defying adults, some over 130 years old, but inhabiting the bodies of teenagers. It’s an uphill struggle because the script doesn’t exactly make it easy for them with a tangled web of a storyline that’s simply too complicated to assimilate in the 70 minutes available to the company.

It starts well, with a stunning set that looks like four vertical sun-tanning beds lit up in an ultraviolet hue. These serve the show well as they are wheeled around to create different spaces and moods as the lighting colour changes.

The show tells the story of a greedy corporate entity, Brin Corp, that provides an AI caregiving service and farms organs, perhaps inspired in part by Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, although this strand is not fully explored.

Five ‘pods’, each housing five people, are dispersed across an unnamed land and when pod #5 gets into trouble and pollution leaks in, threatening the lives of its inhabitants, Brin Corp keep this hushed up. But their dirty deeds are undermined when Kit (James Davis IV) turns up at Pod #1, unannounced, and has to be decontaminated before meeting the inhabitants.

A second visitor, Everest, (Cassius Franciosa) later arrives but he has begun to rapidly age, perhaps because he was exposed to the pollution. It’s really not clear. In fact nothing is.

So for the next 40 minutes or so the play becomes increasingly difficult to deconstruct and the relatively one-paced direction and rather unemotional acting makes it a fairly unengaging production.

With a clearer plot this could turn into an interesting piece, but for now it feels too much like work in progress.

Lifelong is at Studio Two at Assembly George Square Studios until Mon 17 Aug 2026