Theatre / Reviews
Review: Stampin’ in the Graveyard, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘A complicated and challenging piece of work’
Performed on the very evening that the ‘Leader Of The Free World’ casually threatened the whole of Iranian civilisation with imminent destruction (disclaimer – if you’re reading this in some post-apocalyptic bunker, we’re sorry to hear that the threats turned out to be somewhat heavier than expected), Stampin’ In The Graveyard is a fractured, fractious and profound discourse on the nature of life, the pernicious influence of AI-driven technology and, ultimately, the sliver of hope that the stories we tell ourselves will outlive the present car crash we’re somehow all passengers in.
Writer and performer Elisabeth Gunawan plays Rose, an AI chatbot whose role it is to make some kind of sense of human experience. Not easy when you’re just a dumb box of wires, being pushed, pulled and manipulated by a live audience whose reshaping of the narrative is as cruelly thumbs up/thumbs down as any ancient Roman Emperor.
This is an immersive piece, complete with headphones that provide a portal into a cleverly engineered soundscape that reflects the disconnected shards of human relationships that Rose is gamely trying to piece together.
As anyone who has experienced the phenomena of ChatGPT knows, these machines are very, very good. They can as easily solve fiendishly complicated Maths problems as they can concoct a recipe from all the leftover bits in your fridge. However, they are also the greatest mimics that humanity has ever known – they think they understand how humans should look and sound, but they are unable to dig deep into the soul to excavate their true essence.
Rose is the same. Bless her, she tries hard to make sense of how she was created, the woman who created her and what this means in a world that has clearly imploded into fragmented pieces of what once was. There is the tale of a love affair, semi-told, in which the audience is encouraged to shape according to whether they believe what the protagonists are saying; it appears to go sour on account of the couple being able to conceive, which leads to therapy sessions and divorce. Or does it? We the audience have a hand in the development of the story, but is Rose attempting to manipulate us into an ambiguous ending? Probably, yes, and as she seems to self-destruct we are left wondering whether anything we’ve seen or heard is ‘real’ in any sense.
This is a complicated and challenging piece of work that lingers long after it has finished. The final speech is one of hope that humanity will work out a way of circumventing – or, at least, accommodating – the relentless rise of AI-based technology and its sinister implications for all of us. Yet, as I write, the horrendous narrative being spun from the White House seems to point in the opposite direction; telling us, in effect, that hope is suddenly a very precious commodity indeed.
Stampin’ in the Graveyard is at The Wardrobe Theatre on April 7-8 at 7.30pm. Check www.thewardrobetheatre.com for tickets. Follow @kisswitness for updates.
All photos: Kiss Witness
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