On one level, Alan Ayckbourn’s zesty new play is like a comic version of Humans, the Channel 4 drama series exploring the moral complications of keeping sentient machines in the house. There are robot-human love affairs and questions about robot rights. Ayckbourn even has a joke about an anti-android pressure group, one of the programme’s central strands.
Set “some time to come” – and then some decades after that – Constant Companions has fun imagining the hazards of malfunctioning sex robots, misbehaving eco-domestic auto-maids and human-like lovers who never grow old. All it takes is a tweak of an empathy algorithm and a soulless automaton becomes a sexually desirable catch – albeit one with an erratic sense of humour.
