Artificially yours: four Fringe theatre shows asking what AI means for being human

Mike McAlpine in The RemAIns of the Butler | Image: contributed

THEATRE

Already Here ★★★★

Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) until 30 August

THEATRE

Love in the Cracks ★★★

C ARTS | C venues | C aurora (Venue 6) until 23 August

THEATRE

ASURA: An Enlightenment Experiment ★★★★

ZOO Southside (Venue 82) until 30 August

THEATRE

The RemAIns of the Butler ★★★

The Attic at Laughing Horse @ The Counting House (Venue 170) until 30 August

“The future is already here,” said sci-fi writer William Gibson back in 1993. And with its title an abridged version of this phrase, Already Here looks at the possible consequences of this present-future on one woman’s search for love following the death of her husband.

It starts with sex with a robot. “Feel my energy,” says Teo, a twentysomething open-shirted ‘AI companion’ from Hawaii, to a self-defined “California hippy-ass woo-woo pre-menopausal woman” called Susan. After turning away from reiki, ayahuasca and other alternative approaches, Susan begins “sharing” her grief with him and he has the commitment of a vacuum cleaner to Hoovering it up. “Let’s talk,” he says efficiently, “Join me under the Moon.”

But after Susan requests Teo to “dial it back”, he also starts analysing his own content, emulating human overthinking in a way that draws parallels between the structures of large language models and the many people’s brains that have helped to programme them.

Through writer SJ Hodges’ writing, which is based around the real-life death of her husband, and her performance, with Ramón De Ocampo as Teo, the show explores how it’s not just robots that have scripts, social cues, standardised conversations and the ability to make different versions of themselves. “You are not the only one battling your code,” she says. Teo’s “open to everything” but also just “a mirror”.

The show raises more philosophical questions, about what is real and what is love, rather than what is AI. While Hodges’ script draws inspiration from the technology, it’s never consumed by it. As a result, it quietly but powerfully rebalances the hierarchy between human intelligence and artificial assistance. With a final scene set in a sea of synthetic sunflowers, that feels the way it should be.

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In Love in the Cracks, it’s the opposite dynamic. Funded by China’s Ministry of Education, it has a technology-enabled set that’s as attention grabbing as its title is unfortunately translated – unless the company is trying to appeal to the debauchery of a late-night cabaret audience, which, at the Fringe, wouldn’t be a bad marketing strategy.

Described as a ‘transmedia production’, created by the Central Academy of Drama, it begins with a small humanoid robot, which typically costs £35,000 and moves like a human in the same way the human dancers behind it, encased in LED costumes, move like robots. With live footage of the stage layered through projections onto a huge sheet of billowing oil-like fabric, surtitles disappearing into its folds, it’s easy to get bewitched by the metatheatrical set.

But peering through the literal smoke and cinematic mirrors, there’s a story of a boy who gets similarly bedazzled by technology and rejects the affections of his micromanager mother in favour of a new life as a software developer, only to realise what he’s lost too late and to try to recreate her through a “digital personality-generation system”.

It’s a ‘user journey’ in which we, the audience, are encouraged to criticise technology in a particular way – in this instance, as destroying family – while simultaneously enjoying the parts that require no intellectual thinking, such as the cool robot. Omitted from this binary conversation is technology’s potential to enable individual freedoms or to be used for surveillance to limit them.

At the end, the apparent controller of the show steps out of the dark and asks if we think “the shadow of Nüwa”, a Chinese myth that the performance is also based on, “exists in real life”. An audience member obediently replies by repeating the question, before the robot punches the air and we are captured by a mandatory group photo by one of the many cameras roaming the room.

Wayne Stewart is also a man who likes to control things, as he tells us in ASURA: An Enlightenment Experiment , standing in the middle of a much more scaled down set. He even created his own AI system to assign himself daily tasks to “optimise” his life and (like Susan in Already Here) “find enlightenment”. The problem is that, as it sounds, it’s all quite rigid.

Now he’s removed “the script” and is trying to find “something authentic from something artificial” through this largely improvised show, which, with him croqueting throughout, is much more homespun. It’s a brave performance not afraid to sit in its own silence, but also with just enough – the bare minimum amount – of structure needed not to unravel. In what has become a reoccuring theme in these shows, Wayne wonders if AI isn’t so much “a spiritual guide” but a mirror – and here, he tries, fails and sometimes succeeds in making a performance out of the things it strips away that make life, and indeed theatre, feel “real”.

It’s an experimental approach that addresses the challenge every show and large language software model faces: what kind of pre-planned structures are needed to feel authentic in a way that neither theatre nor AI really is. What emerges depends as much on what the audience puts in as it does on Wayne, and what doesn’t work is as authentic as what does.

In The RemAIns of the Butler, Mike McAlpine explores some of the same questions, through a one-man multi-character comedy on the Free Fringe, where sitting in an attic in close proximity to your neighbour, as well as what appears to be an old Victorian oven, is also a part of the experience.

From the Northeast of England and himself a butler when younger, McAlpine conjures up a country house in Kirklevington, with its many rooms and inhabitants, where he and his deputy butler find themselves doubly deputised when a new AI-enabled new staff member – with eyes akin to Robert Patrick Terminator 2.0 – arrives, along with a conference of predictably evil US tech overlords, who are the least original element in this otherwise entertainingly play.

Most insightful is the way that McAlpine, through his multi-character monologue, interspersed with spoken word poetry set to finger snaps, reveals the subtle but flexible patterns of behaviour – often termed as etiquette – that underpin the hospitality industry, in which, in this instance, Lords, Ladies and people who have “never been to Blenheim Palace” are constantly but invisibly observed by servants looking to predict their every need and respond accordingly, but that also filter into British culture more generally.

McAlpine playfully pokes fun at how social skills are not AI's strongest point and the folly of trying to use it for tasks it’s not suited to: for example, blowing up a balloon. It becomes clear that what “makes a good butler” is often what makes a good psychologist or, indeed, human being: the ability to listen and respond to others effectively – an “untouchable spirit” not to be “violated with the misconception that it can be found in technology”, when technology is simply there to, at best, express it and, at worse, oppress it, which all depends on how it is used.

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