Theatre review: East is South

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: Hampstead Theatre invites the critics in next week.

After The Invention of Love saw Hampstead Theatre's main stage get caught up in classical analysis for a couple of hours, Beau Willimon's East is South threatens to do the same thing but with theology. In a secretive facility somewhere under an American desert, international teams of computer coders have been developing "Aggie," an AI more powerful than any seen yet - one that may not only end up passing for real human intelligence, but supercede it. Developers work in pairs and no new code can be approved without checks by multiple teams, but for all the security checks there's been a breach that might see Aggie escape onto the Internet. Lena (Kaya Scoledario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are one of the teams working on the kill switch, the code that can shut down the programme if it gets too powerful and out of control.

But they may have been doing the opposite, and NSA agents Darvish (Nathalie Armin) and Olsen (Alec Newman) are there to interrogate them, along with their manager Ari (Cliff Curtis,) who has himself been an NSA plant all along.

Alex Eales' set gives us a lower space serving as the two different interview rooms where the coders are being questioned separately, with various techniques of coercion, from each being told the other has already confessed all the way up to actual torture; above is the shadowy office where the agents are viewing and recording. The story also flashes back to the illicit and seemingly inevitable love affair between two people who work long hours underground and seem to meet virtually nobody else.

Although still in previews Ellen McDougall's production feels confident, but it's fighting a losing battle with a script that aims for the profound but lands on the profoundly frustrating. At the heart of the play are two questions about where religion fits into AI: Firstly whether making the programme accept contradictions - like the titular one - is the solution to making it understand blind faith, and by extension whether that is the key to it being indistinguishable from a human. Secondly, whether what they're creating isn't just an equal intelligence to humans, but one able to effectively evolve into  a god.

Willimon gives us a number of religious and cultural backgrounds to explore this from: As well as a Russian atheist we have a Sufi Muslim, a Jewish Maori and a Menonite, all either lapsed or never that religious in the first place; they give us many speeches from the existential to the mythological, none of them necessarily dull, but all of them at the expense of anything actually happening - for a team trying to stop a security breach we're meant to infer could be apocalyptic, only Olsen's occasional violent Bad Cop outbursts convey any sense of urgency.

The play's also very light on plot - it feels like we get a few seconds' worth of development for every ten minutes of philosophical musing. Individually these elements could be salvageable but together the overall result feels like it came from a strong idea but ended up half-baked: Between themes that have pretty much revealed themselves from the start and a plot that's drip-fed in tiny amounts, one or both need to deliver a huge rug-pull at the end - possibly involving Aaron Gill's mostly-silent Technician - to make everything click together in a way that feels worth it; but East is South doesn't have one for us.

East is South by Beau Willimon is booking until the 15th of March at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes straight through.