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Predictive anti-drama
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a play about AI that results in a deadening disconnect for its audience
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SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
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ALEX HALL is intrigued by a detailed history of Gaza that demonstrates its historic resilience and changing economy
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MAYER WAKEFIELD is chilled by the co-dependency of two lost souls as portrayed by German communist playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz
East is South
Hampstead Theatre, London
AI IS a grim subject. And Beau Willimon’s East is South at Hampstead Theatre does nothing to alleviate the gloom.
The play is set in a light, clean but bleak interrogation room. A lone young woman communes with herself, and possibly God, seemingly unaware that figures on a balcony watch her every move. She and a fellow systems-programmer are suspected of… well, predictable things: messing with the highly intelligent, fearsomely dangerous AI beast they’ve created, anthropomorphising it, double or triple dealing with Russia and other foreign powers, having a secret affair with one another, and potentially releasing a super-intelligence into the world at large.
A thriller possibly. If so, where’s the suspense?
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