But they believably submerge their liveliness in portrayals of men and women who have been cut adrift in a world of shadowy memories that they firmly disregard.
The park's robotic hosts, haunted by shadowy memories that hint at their past lives and deaths, learn to follow these recollective landmarks out of the conceptual maze of their programming.
Only George Shaw, whose work – painstakingly rendered in Humbrol oils (more usually employed in painting model aircraft in suburban bedrooms) – and who himself was brought up on a Coventry estate – explores similar, subtly unsensational images of English streets as a kind of shadowy collective memory.
At first, they seemed almost peerless in the most literal sense: they clearly had something in common with Stereolab, for whose label they released some singles, but while Stereolab's brand of retro-futurism was Day-Glo bright, Broadcast's was monochrome and spooky and very British, filled with shadowy childhood memories of testcard music and the soundtracks to Programmes for Schools and Colleges.
In this mystical piece, a dead woman wanders a shadowy realm between memory and reality, feeling like an outsider, an immigrant, in life and in death.
It thrusts her into a dangerous underworld and forces her to confront her shadowy childhood, the memory of her abusive father and the sister she thought she'd left to die.
And a nameless lodger, a nobody, boards the boat, a bottle of grappa concealed in his raincoat as he gains his shadowy room, bereaved of memory, homeland, son, with only the noise of distant forests to grieve for his former joys, if anyone is grieved.
The playwright's language, which Mr. Warchus's screenplay skillfully imitates, retains the force of a calligraphic scrawl evoking the shadowy primal emotions of stored-up memory.
I think she must have been a shadowy person because I have only the vaguest memory of her and I have an excellent memory for most things".
