Instructions
Ed Fringe 24
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Ed Fringe 24 -
Instructions is the new play from East-Midlands based company Subject Object, who created the wonderful, audience-led Work.Txt. This time, rather than the audience driving the plot forwards, there is an actor involved, a different one every night who has never seen the script; they read from a prompter on stage and occasionally have lines fed to them through an earpiece. There’s clear inspiration from work like White Rabbit, Red Rabbit and An Oak Tree, and there is still something genuinely exciting about seeing an actor use their technique and experience instinctively right in front of you.
Being able to do that is, I think, central to the play’s purpose; grappling with artificial intelligence’s assault on creativity, Instructions points to a very-near future (that has arguably already arrived) where an actor auditions for a part extensively, only to find themselves replaced with an Ai replica.
The show is fizzing with interesting ideas. Maybe it’s asking us what the difference is between an omnipotent theatre director feeding an Ai replica instructions to doing the same thing to a living, breathing actor. Tim Crouch wrote that ‘playwrights are also leaders - dictators, even - no matter how egalitarian they proclaim to be’ and in feeding the actor lines, telling them where to stand and where to look, isn’t that point being proven here too? Stripping the actor of their agency and utilising them like a tool in much the same way to the camera recording or the microphone amplifying?
Well, to an extent maybe, but what I found myself thinking was that where the play succeeds, by nature of its very form, is in proving just how hollow it would be to replace human creativity with zeroes and ones. One of the key scenes involves the actor interpreting language to create actions, the word ball appears on the screen and they swing a leg for example. As each actor will come to the show with their own experiences, philosophies, training and techniques, each interpretation will be unique to the actor that does it. Where the point of a tool is to replicate a job perfectly over and over, creativity is an overwhelmingly human pursuit.
Instructions is a wonderfully executed theatrical experiment, encouraging its audience to reflect deeply on the role of creativity and the ever-growing prominence of artificial intelligence. The actor at my show, Camilla, was wonderful - playful, responsive, earnest, human. In a world where we could cut out a plethora of mundane tasks with this technology, freeing up human’s to pursue creative endeavours, how dispiriting it is that we’re heading for the reverse.
Instructions is on until the 26th August (not 12th or 19th) at Summerhall, tickets here.
FOUR STARS
