Title: Spillikin

A confused elderly lady and a humanoid robot sing a fractured duet. Out of this unfolds a human love story – the ultimate odd-couple romance, which starts with an awkward teenager meeting an unattainable girl, and then jump-cuts backwards and forwards through the pivotal moments of a long relationship lasting from youth to old age – echoes, fragments of experience, snapshots of a faltering courtship, young marriage, the tragedy of childnessness, secret adultery, career success, companionship, the husband’s illness, and finally the wife’s diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. In response to this the husband, already an obsessive archivist, builds a perfected robotic version of himself, to be deployed after his death: a patient carer, an aide-memoir, a singing partner, able to give order to her confusion, and to bear without complaint the endless repetition required to reassure her. As her mind deteriorates their exchanges acquire an odd poetry, a secret language expressed as a duet. And, on some level, their love survives.