Clash of ideas that do compute

TOGETHER IN ELECTRIC DREAMS

(Swan, Dobcross)

IN the week an early trailer for Danny Boyle’s new biopic of Steve Jobs surfaces, Daniel Thackeray offers a computing partnership rather less successful than that of Apple co-creators Jobs and Wozniak.


The 65-minute on-stage partnership is of Sir Clive Sinclair, cutting-edge engineer of his day, and Alan Sugar, at the time — 1986 — building his cheap-electronics empire.

Together in Electric Dreams has been around for a couple of years and is in Oldham as part of the Manchester Fringe Festival (it’s at Oldham Library tonight; the Swan has other festival shows coming up).

The comic drama is a carefully-researched and entertainingly presented examination of the two men and of the mindsets and talents that put Britain behind the computing curve for years.

People often wonder what Steve Jobs actually did for Apple, since the early designs were created by Jobs’ nerdy friend Steve Wozniak and other engineers. But Jobs was the marketing genius; the one who saw the potential in tech ideas and turned them into products people wanted. or didn’t know they wanted.

There is a parallel with the two Englishmen: Sinclair (played by Thackeray) was the nerdy engineer who hadn’t a clue how to run a business or make products people really wanted, while Sugar (Matthew O’Neill) was a sharp-minded businessman who wanted products to be simple and easy to build.

Thackeray puts these ideas into the context of the pair meeting over dinner to finalise the deal for Sugar to buy the ailing Sinclair company, or which Sugar wanted the lucrative existing products and stock, not the loss-making research division. Sinclair thought it was all worth £100 million, but in the end accepted £16 million.

Along the way Sugar cajoles and bullies, plays power tricks to force Sinclair’s hand and makes it clear Sinclair is not wanted in the new regime.

The ironic thing is that Sinclair’s thought to merge the two companies probably would have been a reasonable one: he would have come up with ideas and Sugar would have told him how to make them more desirable.

Thackeray’s play is interesting throughout, despite basically being a dialogue between two men. But the central battle is an enjoyable one: Sinclair never has a chance, but he’s the only one who doesn’t realise it.