This incredible show is mind-bogglingly thought-provoking; it is also a lot of fun. It begins as a riff on Nassim Soleimanpour’s acclaimed play White Rabbit, Red Rabbit. Each day a lone actor who has not seen the show or read the script gets onto the stage to perform the script’s instructions live in front of an audience. All the actor will know in advance – like us – is that the play is something to do with AI.
This play is a bejewelled puzzle box
Like Soleimanpour’s play there is enormous fun in the way our reaction to the lines and jokes have been predicted in advance by the playwright (Nathan Ellis). There’s a leisurely segue into a play within a play, as the actor plays an actor being filmed auditioning for the lead role in a formulaic RomCom. The unseen Director instructs the actor to perform a whole range of emotions and to give multiple readings of a cliché-ridden declaration of love.
Joy! The actor gets the part! But then the actor can’t get any information about when filming is to begin…
But then… the film is released. And despite never being called for filming, the actor on the screen is the same actor as the one who took the audition.
But then… as the play progresses attitudes start shifting. We move from outrage at the way the actor has been cheated by an AI replica to thinking it is quite an efficient process really. A lot less trouble than actually filming.
But then… as the play refers back to the audition film, weren’t all those actorly emotions just responses to instructions anyway? What is the difference compared to an image generator doing it?
But then… we see the chat show promotional circuit. The actor comes out with the clichés we’ve heard a thousand times before: how great the director was to work with, how the experience has been life changing. It might as well be an AI speaking…
But then… we think of our own responses to the performance – responses predicted by the script – and things become a little troubling…
This play is a bejewelled puzzle box. A reversed Turing Test; the play’s great trick (if it is a trick) is to make us question how far a human is different from a computer. Yet ironically, each audience member will see something else in the box. And ironically, each actor will put something else into it.
A must-see for anyone interested in acting, theatre technique, technology, philosophy, the forthcoming redundancy of the human race or anybody wanting a good laugh.
