LOSS AND GRIEF IN A SILICON WORLD
In a bleak grey minimalist space Merril (a restlessly gamine Myanna Buring) is grieving her much younger sister Angie, who has vanished, presumed abducted and dead. As a software engineer her reaction is to assemble all the digital remnants – every email, text, emoji, retweet, like, and voice recording – and recreate Angie as an algorithm. She is found at the start, chatting away to her by laptop, the pair exchanging cries of “fuck oooffff! … asshole! Shut uuup!”in a merry sisterly way and discussing Casablanca. But it all gets more intense, with a sense of damage rising.
This brand new AI-scifi play is by Lauren Gunderson , who lives in Silicon Valley and has friends in the business. So her meditative thriller has a fine sure touch in indicating the clunks and bafflements – as well as slightly diabolic possibilities – that the brave new world of artificial intelligence chat is bringing us. In voice ,then onscreen, Dakota Blue Richards catches just the Chat-GPT tone we are getting used to, of faint awkwardness and scripted realism, plus a faintly irritable lecturely resistance when it is pointed out that she isn’t real. So she gets rebooted and is fine and sweet again , but then at one terrifying moment starts angrily sounding panicked, “I didn’t want to die..”. Which feels very much as if Merril is projecting her own imaginative terrors of the moment of abduction. If it was abduction. Reboot again.
Well, we all talk to the dead, don’t we? And all have relationships with the living nearly than half of which are digitally assisted. It’s a great idea, this. And after an unnervingly static opening fifteen minutes in which Merril just sits on the grey blank floor talking, Anna Ledwich’s direction speeds things up, and we get the interest of the algorithm’s intelligence suddenly deciding for itself that hey, since it knows more than anyone else about Angie and has a different set of biases to a human, it can do some detective work across the internet, spot patterns and deduce what happened . Being a machine it regards all probabilities as in some way existing, even her survival .
Meanwhile there are some touching, credible moments with Merril’s ex-lover Raquel (Yolanda Kettle, expressing the exasperation of all of us about this AI attempt at closure) and some less successful ones with the girls’ ex-junkie mother (Abigail Thaw , not given nearly enough scope).
It’s as much a play about grief and memory as about AI itself. And yes, in its sharp 90 minutes it does get exciting, because – no spoilers – there is a resolution, and there is a final moment of choice. Because long before screens, human grief was always a form of editing and reconstructing. We are messy , emotionally undesigned for tidiness and flat screens, and need to touch one another ‘IRL’.
Earlier this year there was another play about a cyber-zombified AI robot used to console the bereaved or demented: Marjorie Prime (at the Donmar). That evening had me concluding that. “Some of its appeal is in enjoying your own dislike of a future society, trying to soothe its terrors of death and disintegration with AI lies. You leave remembering that all flesh is grass and all memory fallible, and both are much the better for it”.
I still think so. You have to, really.
Box office. Hampsteadtheatre.com. To 14 oct
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