East is South at Hampstead Theatre review: this AI thriller is a waste of acting talent

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.

Plot-wise, it’s about two programmers hired to write a “kill code” that will bring down a self-educating AI called Logos if it “escapes”. Lena (Scodelario) herself escaped abuse in the tech-averse Mennonite community to become an ace coder but still prays every night. Sasha (Treadaway) is a Russian dissident ex-pianist and possibly a double- or triple-agent who has also become Lena’s lover.

When a security alert is triggered by an apparent attempt to override the kill code, the two are interrogated by Samira (Nathalie Armin), an American-born Iranian lesbian Sufi from the National Security Agency. Lena’s mentor on the philosophy of tech, a Jewish Māori and sometime Oxytocin addict called Ari (Cliff Curtis), also turns out to be a government spook, albeit one with strong views on the significance of the Haka in New Zealand culture.

Still with me? We gather the unnamed creators of Logos were backed, overtly or covertly by Uncle Sam and their every move surveilled. But aha, the two coders foxed the entire national security apparatus by turning their backs on the (one) hidden camera tracking them and switching on a fan to drown their words. Weirdly, the extinction event they may have triggered is investigated just by Samira, a knucklehead keen to start breaking fingers, and a typist. Maybe the NSA has been subject to a Musk purge, who knows?

Look, I know theatre can’t have a cast of thousands like Andor, but if six characters – no, five and a half: no, four and three quarters - are expected to carry vast swathes of human experience in the face of doom, they should at least be imbued with credibility and urgency. Willimon and director Ellen McDougall seem to think the boggling tech-bantz and Ari’s ironic views on just about everything are more important than believable human relationships or a sense of pace.

Treadaway’s Sasha, his accent meandering, is insouciant about everything until one shrieking, shirt-ripping moment revealing a scalded, wiry torso. Left in isolation, Scodelario’s Lena resorts to urinating in a snack bowl: later, warned that she might be tortured, she says “I’m prepared” as if she’s been told the Wi-Fi is about to go down. It’s hardly Zero Dark Thirty.

The frustrating thing, apart from the waste of acting talent, is that Willimon’s thoughts on AI – human tech-zealots creating a deity that could annihilate us – seem tantalizingly profound. But in this underpopulated thriller they’re buried behind hackneyed characterisations and lines like: “Was that the double-bind situation when we were exploring negative capability?” Which could, ironically, have been written by an AI asked to spout meaningless jargon.

Hampstead Theatre, to Mar 15; hampsteadtheatre.com