Trilogy explores digital’s dehumanising effects
The National Theatre of Scotland is surely one of very few drama companies (if not the only one) to have among its staff a “digital thinker in residence”. It is little surprise, then, that its new trilogy of short plays (staged by director Cora Bissett under the umbrella title
Interference) focuses on the future impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and other developing technologies.
In the first play, Darklands by Morna Pearson, young couple Brie (Shyvonne Ahmmad impressing on her professional stage debut) and Logan (Nicholas Ralph) are trying to have a baby. No mean feat given that they work for a sinister entity known only as The Company, which keeps them prisoner in its hi-tech facility and regulates every aspect of their lives.
Living, for the most part, in separate rooms where their only communication is with a disembodied AI voice (Maureen Beattie), they are directed towards an experiment in which the distinction between human and machine will be irreversibly destroyed.
Hannah Khalil’s Metaverse could almost be a sequel to Pearson’s play. In it, a scientist (played with integrity and feeling by the ever-excellent Beattie) tries to use technology to break down the dehumanising effects of digitisation.
Preferring loneliness to interaction with her pseudo-human robot, she strives to restore a sense of touch to digital interaction in general, and her virtual communication with her daughter in particular.
However, The Company (making another bleak appearance) has other, altogether darker, plans for her work.
Both plays have their virtues but fall into rather obvious, dystopian sci-fi tropes, rendering them somewhat lacklustre. However, The third drama – Glowstick, by promising young writer Vlad Butucea – is much better.
Here, we encounter River, an elderly woman, who is confined to a wheelchair by an unbearably painful medical condition. Living in a drowned world (due, one assumes, to catastrophic climate change), she is in the care of a robot nurse (a fine, often comic performance by Moyo Akandé).
Butucea finds a poetic language for River’s desperate clinging to memory that is absent from the other two plays. Ultimately (and ironically), by elevating human intelligence and emotion above AI in his human character’s drive to end her own life, he creates the most hopeful moment of the entire evening.