Edinburgh Fringe: AI Explored Through Creative Theater
Edinburgh’s annual fringe festival has long been a crucible for exploring the anxieties and aspirations of our age, and this year, artificial intelligence takes center stage. As with any nascent technology that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined—from radio voices in our living rooms to movie stars on a screen—AI profoundly unsettles us. The instant, often imperfect, poetry of a ChatGPT prompt mirrors the disorienting wonder that the first printed books must have evoked in an illiterate populace. How do we reconcile something that communicates with human-like nuance yet possesses no physical form? This fundamental uncertainty permeates the AI-themed productions at the Fringe, often manifesting in an apocalyptic mood, prompting a collective question: are we merely bequeathing our future to machines?
One striking example is Dead Air, where playwright Alfrun Rose portrays Alfie, a contemporary, female Hamlet. Like Shakespeare’s iconic character, Alfie grapples with a deceased father and a mother who has moved on with a new partner, John. However, Alfie’s father is not a ghost but an AI simulacrum, a digital replica sustained by a subscription service called AiR. As long as she maintains payments, Alfie can cling to this virtual paternal presence, and with it, her profound sense of survivor’s guilt and unresolved issues. The service, complete with cheerful operatives and hold music, offers a near-perfect, yet subtly flawed, reproduction of the man. Rose’s absorbing narrative delves less into the technical limits of AI and more into the complex process of grief. Alfie’s anger towards her mother and John stems not from them, but from her own miscarriages, conflating the loss of her father with the loss of her children. This virtual father, however lifelike, ultimately prolongs her inertia, unable to provide the genuine closure she seeks.
A different vision of AI’s future unfolds in Stampin’ in the Graveyard, where Elisabeth Gunawan embodies Rose, an AI chatbot claiming to guide humanity through the end of the world. Rose, authentically stiff-jointed, navigates a digital interface plagued by glitches and network errors, punctuated by on-screen “rose” graphics when she “hallucinates.” In this tech-savvy production, co-created with movement director Matej Matejka for Kiss Witness, the audience, equipped with headphones, is polled to shape optional storylines, ensuring each show plays out uniquely. The overarching narrative is a catastrophic descent, beginning with a couple seeking marriage guidance from a vending machine and culminating in forced separations and closed airports. Gunawan’s performance, enhanced by a steampunk synth-accordion hybrid crafted from recycled electronics, paints a fascinating, if bleak, picture of a future defined by pervasive computer errors and digital indifference, a hostile landscape for messy human interaction.
Pushing the boundaries of personalized theatre, New York’s Angry Fish Theater and the Ally Artists Group employ AI to generate a bespoke script for each audience member in AI: The Waiting Room – An Audiovisual Journey. Before the show, spectators complete a questionnaire, sharing details about their ambitions, loved ones, and legacy. By the time they enter the studio, a custom-built story awaits them via headphones, delivered by a freakishly realistic voice. These unique narratives are woven into a larger, universal tale of societal breakdown and high-tech rejuvenation. While one spectator might hear a saga involving a sugary moon, a bag of gold, and sixty-one statues, another might experience a romantic story about themselves and their family cat—a testament to the technology’s capacity for hyper-personalization. As the audience moves freely through a studio, observing a monochrome animation (potentially AI-generated itself), they are prompted to embody characters within their stories. Though some demands for audience participation, like a “dance party,” feel somewhat forced, the production remains an intriguing and quirky attempt to harness an inhuman technology for profoundly human creative expression.
Edinburgh’s embrace of AI in theatre showcases a nuanced understanding of its implications, moving beyond simple dystopian fears to explore its unsettling capacity to mirror our deepest anxieties, process our grief, and even craft surprisingly intimate, if digitally mediated, personal narratives.