The year is 2043 and the world’s data has been so comprehensively harvested that a dating app promises subscribers a perfect match with every compatible partner on the planet. As the advert tells us: “Love is simply an algorithm.”
That is, unless you are deemed “undesirable” by the algorithm. This near future has intimations of the Orwellian, including mandated adverts spewing out on screen to its citizens and artificial intelligence giving lessons on humanness.
Staged at the Edinburgh festival in 2023, David Head’s play is about love and human connection alongside AI. It excels in the weight of its philosophical ideas and is beautifully written.
Head, who also performs, cuts the drama through with four discrete stories of a man who is judged undesirable; a tech wizard with a broken heart who sets out to “solve love” by creating the ultimate dating app; a miner-astronaut running out of oxygen in space; and an AI figure on screen (Jessica Munna).
The stories are interwoven in their telling but feel less connected as a whole in this monologue cum lecture. Head narrates, sitting on a stool or working a puppet of the trapped miner (to wonderful effect), and adverts and voiceovers are interspersed to convey a bigger sense of the brave new world he is in.
The play’s intellectual curiosity is arresting, with profound questions on AI and what makes us human, although characters sometimes explore ideas while their dramatic trajectories are truncated or tail off.
To offset the play from spinning into unanchored abstraction, director Laura Killeen creates an ambient experience using screens, audio and a lovely immersive slow twirl of blue disco-style lights which reflects interplanetary life.
The uplifting ending is too neat but reminds us of how humanness cannot be matched by machine thinking, how love defies logic and how dreams are not so easily banished. At 70 minutes the show brings much food for thought and remarkably, given our times, makes you glad to be living in 2024.
At the Arcola theatre, London, until 30 November
