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?

Interrogation gets under way, continuing indeed for the full 100 minutes of the play. Occasional flashbacks or asides interrupt. But largely it’s words, words, words. 

And, though the characters have names they’re too undifferentiated to need them, spraying their dialectic into the air in one discursive stream. The drama, meanwhile, surfaces only through scattered moments, relying on a visit to the toilet for expression, or on the much-promised performance of a Maori haka that comes — arbitrarily — too late for impact. And the characters seem to gabble to one another, lost in their own private conversation with little or no concession to an audience that is trying hard to keep up. 

The whole thing smacks of arrogance, which is a shame because philosophically, the play is profound. It’s the stuff of 1984 after all, only here we are 40 years on and “Big Brother” has truly transmogrified into the scariest monster of all: an artificial intelligence that replaces humankind as the victor in the evolutionary race. Evolving beyond us, asserting whatever it likes as “truth,” trashing the human construct that is God, and questioning the very basis of human consciousness, AI is here poised to consign humans to a blind, animal existence, powerless in the face of the greater life-form we have, ourselves, so casually spawned.  

It’s a real and present danger in the world. So why is this not a play of stature? 

The playwright’s formidable pedigree, director Ellen McDougall’s wealth of experience, and a cast hand-picked to perfection should together guarantee a good night out. But even actors Kaya Scodelario, Luke Treadaway, Nathalie Armin and Cliff Curtis joining forces with Alec Newman and Aaron Gill can’t raise the game for characters who never seem truly in jeopardy, nor ever betray the pheromones of fear that should be in abundance.

Unfortunately, somewhere in this project, Willimon has proved himself just too smart for his own good. And while cleverness and articulacy proliferate, the result for the audience is a deadening disconnect.

Could this be the author’s deliberate ploy: to make the audience feel the human irrelevance that is to come? Is it for essential immersive learning that we leave the theatre as miserably as we do?

If so, it backfires. For we, as sentient beings, still judge a play by its intrinsic empathy. And here there is none.

Runs until March 15. Box office: (020) 7722-9301, hampsteadtheatre.com.