EAST IS SOUTH
Hampstead Theatre
★★★
“The cast is superb and slips through the gears with unruffled confidence”
In his break-out hit House of Cards, writer Beau Willimon peered into the darker culverts of the human soul to assemble Kevin Spacey’s sinister politician Frank Underwood. In the dazzlingly complex East Is South, he stays in the same vicinity but stares fixedly upwards.
He is doing nothing less than searching for God, or her composite parts.
His new play asks whether Agi – the anthropomorphised AI machine – has the necessary attributes to claim the role.
These dense philosophical disquisitions are, mercifully, pinned to a conventional genre plot. Someone has sidestepped protocols and attempted to release Agi into the outside world.
The stage is a soulless interrogation suite in a secret facility. Coders Lena (Kaya Scodelario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) are quizzed by diligent NSA agent Samira (Nathalie Armin). Loitering in the shadows is mentor and walking Ted talk Ari Abrams (Cliff Curtis), who is battling his own demons, except he doesn’t believe in such things.
On a two-tier stage, the office above is set aside for the watchers, the agents and the monitors.
Despite Lena’s plaintive denials, there are reasons to suspect her motives. She comes from a strict Mennonite Christian upbringing and her vetting throws up some dubious episodes in her past. Then there’s her relationship with Sasha, a Russian refugee who literally bears the scars of a repressive regime.
Why would they risk everything – freedom, life, intellectual exploration – on a fool’s errand? Another question might be, why deny Agi her manifest destiny?
Under Ellen McDougall’s unobtrusive direction, the interrogation scenes ground a script which, like a toppled firework, has an instinct to shoot off in brilliant tangents. The cross-examinations are tense, revelatory – and comprehensible.
Elsewhere, it feels like an explosion in an encyclopedia factory, with characters picking up random pages and reading aloud. We have an explanation of the Māori Haka, a disquisition on the duality of mind and body, a theory of dark matter, an update on efficient evolution, some rousing Bach deconstruction, an unfortunate incident with a snack bowl and a torrent of other fragmentary pieces that attempt to cohere into a grasp of ineffability, which by nature and definition proves impossible.
Meanwhile agent Olsen (Alec Newman), an amusingly simple soul among a collection of racked consciences, only wants to break fingers and find the truth. While others have multiple descriptors (Māori Jew, Sufi Muslim) he’s just an American, he says, and tired of all the high-falutin’ speechifying.
The cast is superb and slips through the gears with unruffled confidence. Scodelario is nicely unreadable as the idealistic coder, neatly balancing a clear intellectual rigour with a soft and damaged heart. Treadaway is sinuous and sly. Armin gives the thankless role of interrogator depth, while professorial Curtis steals scenes with his nuanced Eeyore ramblings.
They all wear their brilliance lightly. This is just as well, because the heavy-handed approach to the topic threatens to snuff out the guttering candle that is leading us mere mortals through this mazy nether world.
In the end, the posturing longueurs edge out the needs of genre drama such that relationships are rushed and the plot twists are never entirely convincing.
Nevertheless, this is an ambitious and fearless attempt to explore the nature of AI which threatens to revive discussions of the divine just as we in the West have settled for secularity.
What emerges is the irrational need for transcendence and ritual that make us both human and – in Agi’s eyes – unfit for purpose.
EAST IS SOUTH
Hampstead Theatre
Reviewed on 17th February 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Manuel Harlan
Previously reviewed at this venue:
AN INTERROGATION | ★★★★ | January 2025
KING JAMES | ★★★★ | November 2024
VISIT FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN | ★★ | July 2024
THE DIVINE MRS S | ★★★★ | March 2024
DOUBLE FEATURE | ★★★★ | February 2024
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL | ★★★★ | December 2023
ANTHROPOLOGY | ★★★★ | September 2023
STUMPED | ★★★★ | June 2023
LINCK & MÜLHAHN | ★★★★ | February 2023
THE ART OF ILLUSION | ★★★★★ | January 2023
