Eliza review – an ambitious, unsettling play about the birth of AI

Dan Spielman as German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in Eliza, a Melbourne Theatre Company production about the birth of AI. Photograph: Pia JohnsonView image in fullscreenDan Spielman as German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in Eliza, a Melbourne Theatre Company production about the birth of AI. Photograph: Pia JohnsonReviewEliza review – an ambitious, unsettling play about the birth of AIMelbourne Theatre CompanyWhile the cast is excellent, a play that sends us back to artificial intelligence’s genesis moment should feel more human than this

It can be fiendishly difficult to write plays about contemporary obsessions, not least because they can shift and mutate in the time it takes to mount a production. A clever solution is to set your work at the point in history where said obsession began; that way you can still create resonant theatre within more stable boundaries. Eliza, Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s new play for MTC, cleaves to this formula, focusing on the German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the firstlings of AI.

Read moreWeizenbaum (Dan Spielman) is working at MIT in 1966 with colleague Ron (Hamish Michael) and secretary Becky (Manali Datar) when he comes up with a programming language that arguably represents the birth of artificial intelligence – although he’d be the first person to argue it doesn’t. Weizenbaum creates a program that mimics the language and tone of psychoanalysis, parroting phrases and asking open-ended questions of the “how do you feel about that?” variety. In this way, he aims to debunk Alan Turing’s theory that machines may one day learn to think.

To his immediate horror, he finds that rather than help celebrate a minor theoretical victory, his colleagues and superiors become enraptured by the idea that this program – dubbed Eliza after the protagonist of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion – understands them and responds in meaningful ways to their needs. Becky, in particular, seems very taken with Eliza, although it could just be that she feels listened to, rare in the chauvinist working environment of 1960s computing science.

View image in fullscreenDan Spielman, Hamish Michael and Manali Datar in Eliza. Photograph: Pia JohnsonFor a while, Eliza deals naturalistically with its conceit; it seems the play might go the way of Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51, about Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA; thoughtful and meditative. But Holloway has a different show entirely in mind. Soon, jarring and offbeat notes are introduced, and characters start to behave strangely – especially Weizenbaum himself, who tries to hide a clock in his jacket and is eventually spitting out birds’ feathers.

A key artistic inspiration (at least behind the production and possibly behind the play) seems to be Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial. Both protagonists share the same first name. Dale Ferguson’s set, with its seemingly endless rows of white file boxes and spinning wheels of machinery, evokes the maddening prison of Josef K’s work environment. And Paul Jackson’s eerily antiseptic lighting, buzzing over the playing space, directly mimics scenes from the film.

Holloway’s surrealistic approach to the material has some benefits: it unsettles the audience, keeping us behind the imitation game rather than looking down on the characters from a position of superior knowledge; and it underlines our greatest fears about reality and its susceptibility to be faked. But it also distances us from the humanity of these people: they become cyphers and, as the narrative starts to take on the familiar contours of psychological horror, they become less interesting.

View image in fullscreen‘The set, with its seemingly endless rows of white file boxes and spinning wheels of machinery, evokes the maddening prison of Josef K’s work environment.’ Photograph: Pia JohnsonPaige Rattray directs with precision and gusto, leaning into the play’s exaggerated theatrics and tonal leaps with a welcome sense of fun. This helps the play move at a cracking pace, but it also skirts any real emotion. The three actors are excellent, led by Spielman as the increasingly appalled and bewildered Weizenbaum, a Victor Frankenstein with moral stature. Michael is a riot as several characters, each with a funnier and more outrageous accent, and Datar is pitch-perfect as Becky, sharp even in consolation, able to turn on a dime. Her transformation into a therapist late in the show is an extra delight.

Holloway is an intuitive and ambitious playwright – even if he wears his influences on his sleeve, from Ziegler to Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill – and Eliza is a noble and often very funny attempt to wrestle with one of the major preoccupations of our time. It makes an unambiguous point about the intrinsic lie at the centre of the AI debate: the issue isn’t that machines will think like us (they can’t), but that we’ll believe they do. And that will be enough to ruin us.

The production utilises a highly effective theatrical language (the theatre buzzes like a datacentre) to emphasise the slickness and shine of artificial intelligence, but I wonder if this was the right way to go. A play that sends us back to AI’s genesis moment – when humans grappled with Promethean ideas and moral consequences – should feel more human than this.