East is South
At a time when artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be in the headlines every day, this densely philosophical techno-thriller by Beau Willimon – creator and showrunner of Netflix’s House of Cards – certainly feels timely. Computer coders Lena (Kaya Scodelario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are locked in NSA waiting rooms, awaiting questioning by special agent Samira Darvish (Nathalie Armin) and their boss, Ari Abrams (Cliff Curtis). They’ve been developing a ‘kill code’ for the artificial general intelligence system, Logos, that they’ve been working on. But now it looks as though someone has tried to override the system and ‘release’ Logos into the outside world. Was it them? Or was it Logos itself?
This production, directed by Ellen McDougall, jumps straight into big, ethical questions about humanity mimicking God. It’s a favoured trope of science fiction – to which Willimon brings a lot of contemporary theoretical thinking on AI and an Edward Snowdon-flavoured ‘hacktivist’ dimension. He gives Lena, a former Mennonite who is possibly, unknowingly, looking for something to replace her traditional faith, and Sasha, a Russian civil rights protestor, plenty of backstory acreage, as characters lengthily debate truth, falsehood and exactly what Logos is.
This is a very talky play, to which McDougall adds movement and pacing by using Azusa Ono’s lighting design and Alex Eales’s split-level set – with the NSA agents watching Lena and Sasha from above – to weave in flashbacks and to...