East is South – Hampstead Theatre | Review

Lena (Kaya Scodelario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway), computer coders, are working on an artificial intelligence program (and it is ‘program’, not ‘programme’, because it’s American). They have been trying to get it to ‘think’, inverted commas mine, complete untruths, for reasons that weren’t and still aren’t entirely clear to me. I can only presume they were trying to be ‘good’ coders, testing the program rigorously. Nothing wrong with this, as far as I could see, from an ethical and moral standpoint, as well as from a technical one: of course, east isn’t south, and six isn’t seven, and so on. But what if an AI program could be trained to somehow accept something that isn’t true? What would the implications be?

I’m struggling to comment further on those questions, not because I don’t want to give too much away, but because the play was too impenetrable and didn’t really answer those points. What this production provides instead is an increasingly threatening and tense atmosphere, thanks to investigations by the National Security Agency (NSA) – the organisation former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden worked for. Tom Olsen (Alec Newman), a senior NSA agent, was quite determined to be as bolshy and headstrong as possible, resorting to physical violence to extract whatever it was he wanted from whomever he wanted. There was a whistleblower, but the NSA hierarchy sided with Olsen, and the whistleblower’s services were immediately rendered surplus to requirements.

Ari Abrams (Cliff Curtis), a former academic, had some interesting points to make, but watching him was often like watching a different play altogether, in which there was space for civility and exploring existential and philosophical questions. This would have been quite all right if, like The Invention of Love, the previous show at this venue, this production was set in an academic environment in the first place. In an interrogation room, Abrams’ discourses largely came across as superfluous, and it is left to Lena to make the link between a religious person exercising ‘blind faith’ and an artificial intelligence program unable to make that leap.

The staging is on two levels, an interrogation room downstairs and an observation room upstairs, the latter kitted out with recording equipment and various computers, mostly used by an unnamed technician (Aaron Gill). Not that there was an awful lot to record at times – Lena spends hours, under duress, writing out code by hand from memory. Presumably the NSA wouldn’t trust her to use a computer to type it out. Frankly, I’d trust an AI program to come up with something more coherent than this baffling word soup of a play that can’t decide whether it’s a discussion about the role of religion and philosophy in contemporary society (no wonder snoring could be heard in the audience, at least from where I was sat, at the press night performance, no less), or about the dangers and risks of the ever-increasing popularity of artificial intelligence. The cast do their best with what they are given, but the script was too disengaging to be treated with the seriousness that the subject matter deserves.

Review by Chris Omaweng

What if this? God didn’t create the universe. It’s the universe’s project to create God?

Logos is a sophisticated artificial intelligence programme on the verge of consciousness. If it escapes its confines, it could pose a grave threat to humanity. When there is a security breach, two codes are interrogated in a race against time to find out who has done what and why. This tense thriller considers the questions that rapidly advancing technology demands we confront: What does it mean to be human? And what is our place in a world where we are no longer the most evolved beings?

CAST
Samira Darvish – Nathalie Armin
Ari Abrams – Cliff Curtis
The Technician – Aaron Gill
Olsen/Pastor – Alec Newman
Lena – Kaya Scodelario
Sasha – Luke Treadaway

CREATIVE TEAM
Writer – Beau Willimon
Director – Ellen McDougall
Designer – Alex Eales
Lighting Designer – Azusa Ono
Sound Designer – Tingying Dong
Composer – Colin Stetson
Sound Designer – Zakk Hein
Movement Director – Sung Im Her
Musical Director – David Ridley
Voice and Dialect Coach – Aundrea Fudge
Intimacy Director – Sara Green
Fight Director – Bret Yount

EAST IS SOUTH
Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, London NW3 3EU
7 February to 15 March 2025