Theatre review: anthropology

After a quiet summer Hampstead Theatre kicks off its new season with anthropology, Lauren Gunderson's play that takes the very topical subject of AI and... well, it's not particularly clear what, if anything, it does with it. Angie (Dakota Blue Richards) has been missing, presumed dead, since she disappeared at college a couple of years ago in a suspected kidnapping. Her sister Merrill (MyAnna Buring, as opposed to YourAnna Buring) is a Something Something Computers, who is processing the loss by creating an algorithm that's been fed all the digital information Angie left behind, and as the play begins she switches it on for the first time, finding that - apart from being a bit nicer than the real thing - the digital version is an uncannily accurate representation that seems to know her sister in ways even her programmer doesn't.

AIngie convinces That Merrill to get back together with her ex-girlfriend Raquel (Yolanda Kettle,) which apparently just involves asking her out and she'll completely forget the reasons she dumped her, whatever they might have been.

She even manages to engineer a tentative reunion with their Bad Mother Brin (Abigail Thaw,) who develops a more meaningful text relationship with Angie 2.0 than she had with Angie 1.0. But ultimately That Merrill has always hoped RoboAngie might hold the secret to what really happened to her sister, and perhaps even discover if she's still alive after all.

So what started as a play about AI doesn't touch on any of the technical or ethical issues surrounding the subject, possibly because that would involve Gunderson finding out what some of them are (for a being that says its thought processes are largely governed by probabilities, the Angiematronic certainly likes to describe the probability of things with specific, technical terms like "not zero" and "a lot.") Instead this promises to turn into a techno-thriller, perhaps a race against time to save FleshAngie. It doesn't, though.

Anna Ledwich's production doesn't manage to make proceedings any less flat: Although there are snarky references to the minimalist style of That Merrill's apartment, the actors still look lost on the vast, clinical stage Georgia Lowe has designed for it. Ironically, when the design opens up to the full size of the stage it becomes less of a problem, as we're now in a much more abstract space. But we're still meandering through the various genres the play toys with, before landing firmly on melodrama just like the writer's last play at this threatre.

Apparently Gunderson's work is wildly popular worldwide; but so, presumably, are the made-for-TV movies it too closely resembles, or they wouldn't keep making them: Not Without My Chatbot. Spoiler Alert, I guess, for the fact that anthropology ends, perhaps inevitably, with one of those last-second Shock! Twists! that doesn't actually mean anything if you think about it. Also Daniel Denton's video design heavily features bees. Me neither.

anthropology by Lauren Gunderson is booking until the 14th of October at Hampstead Theatre.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: The Other Richard.