REVIEW: Do iPhones Dream of Electric Sheeple? by Neil Weatherall at Lion and Unicorn Theatre 20-24 June

‘A sense of dread hangs over this gripping and perplexing piece’ ★★★★ ½

 The app is simple. It allows you to communicate with an array of chatbots who are mindless and annoying enough to pass as human, or at least certain kinds of humans like vegans, Brexit supporters, and theatre critics. Once you understand this “context” of the bot’s identity, the app’s creator says, you start to see the bot as a person. There are a few issues, most notably, that finding out that the bots are not really people seems to cause cannibalism. We may in fact be inside the app right now, in which case all the talk of cannibalism may be a sinister kind of coercion or the hallucination of an AI. How would we know? What will we do if we find out? And does this description of human identity and motivation seem plausible or is it exactly what a machine programmed to pass as human would say?

 The characters (if that is what they are), played with quiet intensity by Leena Makoff and Luca Lavagetto, keep talking about what it means to be human, or alive, or to have a soul. They also happen to be presenters at a conference on intelligence – but not artificial intelligence, spy stuff, apparently, though neither of them is willing to reveal much about the content of their presentations, at least as first. The boundaries of the discussion keep changing as if one or both of them is just reframing what the other is saying, like two AIs trying to have a conversation or two spies trying not to give too much away or two strangers trying to forge a connection. A third figure, silent and faceless, played by Daniel Formosa, lurks in the background. No one wants to give their real name, either because it’s online etiquette or because they don’t know it, but the program reveals that they are called Tom, Dick, and Harry. Suspicious.

“They’re dicks” but “they don’t understand,” one character says about the bots. But it isn’t clear in this play who does understand what and who is just spouting a plausible combination of words. The more annoying and confused the characters become, the more human they seem. Meanwhile, something human-shaped is lurking in the background. But, as Dick tells us, just because something is human-shaped doesn’t mean it is really human. Does that make it worse or better? A sense of dread hangs over this gripping and perplexing piece. I haven’t quite figured it all out. I think it’s a masterpiece, but maybe I – just like the chatbots – don’t understand.

Do iPhones Dream of Electric Sheeple? by Neil Wetherall at Lion and Unicorn Theatre 20-24 June 2023 June What's On — LION & UNICORN THEATRE (thelionandunicorntheatre.com)

Cast:

Tom - Leena Makoff

Dick - Luca Lavagetto

Harry - Daniel Formosa

Writer: Neil Weatherall

Directors: Leena Makoff and Julie Drake

Producer: 5Go Theatre Company

Other creatives: Julie Drake (Producer, Set & Costumes Designer), Pat Dynowska (Movement Director), Tomis Fras (Soundscape Composer), Rebecca Lyon (Lighting Designer) and Isabel Melim (Stage Manager/Sound and Lighting Technician).

Reviewer Clio Doyle is a playwright and lecturer in English literature.