A THREAT CALLED AGGIE
. Good when the news feeds theatre-moments. This week, AI solved in two days a medical conundrum which had baffled humans for a decade. On the other hand, a mischievous journalist tricked ChatGPT into telling the world that Dr Crippen was a melancholic poet. Whether we are heading to heaven or hel with Artificial Intelligence is still anybody’s guess, but it’s a good subject for drama .
And should be thrillingly suspenseful in the hands of Beau Willimon, former showrunner for House of Cards US. He explains that the TV writers’ strike made him turn to the stage for this, so hopes were high at Hampstead. He offers us Lena (Kaya Scodelario) nervy and clever, deep in the mysteries of coding ,,and in flight from a Mennonite anti-tech cult childhood and abuse. Her teammate and lover is Russian Sasha (Luke Treadaway), restless, lively and very watchable .
The pair are one of eleven teams of coders working on the giant AI “Logos” programme, and are being questioned by an NSA (National Security Agency) panel including an Iranian lesbian Sufi , the soft spoken Samira (Nathalie Armin) and the Jewish-Māori, Ari (an imposing Cliff Curtis) . He at one point breaks the fourth wall with a complicated lecture on the philosophy of dualism, in which he does not believe, and starts sweating for no very clear reason. Their boss is Tom, who for a good while scowlingly monitors the investigation on a platform overhead with his arms folded, and who when asked for his antecedents by Sufi-Jewish-Maori colleagues snaps “I’m American!”. Behind a desk in the hq above is a technician with little to say , which ironically means we would really like to hear more. I rather hoped he’d break out, but alas not.
Ellen McDougall’s production is fairly pacy, but the play itself should be either more tense, or more personally engaging. The former is hampered by its eagerness to bombard us with ideas about accelerated evolution and exponential self-learning; the emotional deficit is because Lena and Sasha don’t convince us of their mutual attraction in the flashbacks of their working alliance. (the NSA knows far too much about their lives and texts as well as their work: the sense of stifling deep-underground military-level security is very effective) . The core of the problem is that Sasha believes that God didn’t create the universe but that having evolved the human brain and its inventions, the universe is now creating God. Which is Logos. And which is “bigger than any nation” and could end war and disease. Though whether it would bother to is , at one stage, explicitly doubted.
So – though actually a NSA agent himself – he is an enemy within it. He and Lena are supposed to be developing Orion, a Trojan programme to control or switch off Logos if it tries to take over the world. They amiably call Logos Aggie (AGI, Artificial General Intelligence) and are sabotaging Orion to free it – her – to become God. Which it seems she can only do by grasping the theological mystery that things can be both one thing and something opposite: you know, God and man, nowhere and everywhere, east is south, all that….
Aggie does nearly get there, in a terrific light show which I thought might be the finale. But the NSA – stern Tom – doesn’t want mystical dualism messing with global servers and resorts to handcuffs and finger-breaking while Ari reanimates his former drug habit and delivers a spectacular final haka from his ancestry. And that really is the finale, beautifully dramatic too.
OK, it would be a stronger play with a few cuts – 100 straight minutes without laughter to ease us is taxing, and to be honest the ‘abuse” plot doesn’t do much for it. And I got irritated by Lena’s final moment which feels, sigh, like one of those too-familiar tragic flourishes beloved of modern playwrights who want to shock and not be criticized for it. . But the whole thing is more interesting than frustrating, and has a serious go at the philosophical moral issues around AI.
Moreover, since right now it looks as if power over our our future destiny is being shared out between tech bros and the iron fist of US Security exceptionalism, it’s not a waste of time.
hampsteadtheatre.com to 15 March
Rating 3.
theatreCat 