Beau Willimon’s play asks whether Artificial Intelligence will attain god-like dominion over mankind, and blends Brainiac levels of sophisticated thinking with elements of clunking dumbness. Skins and Hollywood star Kaya Scodelario (making her adult stage debut) and Luke ‘Curious Incident’ Treadaway lead a cast of six whose characters act as proxies for the whole human race but seem only mildly distracted by the existential crisis unfolding.
Willimon, an acclaimed playwright who became showrunner on Netflix’s House of Cards and now works on Andor and Severance, packs a lot into the play’s 100 minutes. Ideas about belief, consciousness, identity and morality decouple and reconnect like trapeze artists in flight. The title refers to AI’s current inability to understand contradiction or paradox. The dialogue is unashamedly full of stuff about “intelligence being substrate-independent” and the like.
