★★★★

“incredibly beautifully written with effortless alternation between comedy and horror”

“Oh, can we just start over?” Gabriela Flarys asks the audience as she pretends to forget her lines. The line is of course deliberate and is referring to something else – the recent ending of her relationship. Gabriela is lost and is looking for a way through. She is in pain and is struggling to keep a lid on the thoughts that will not stop flowing as she tries to work out why her relationship is over.

Deluge is an apt title to this marvellous solo performance. Emotions, thoughts, and passion pour out of Gabriela in this intense 60-minute retelling of ‘the end’, as she calls it throughout. The performance is frenetic as she jumps from one stage of grief to the next. There are many individual plot lines which present themselves as loose ends initially. The consistent reference to her former partner’s affection for jam and a two week holiday to Australia to try and save the relationship are just two. However, Gabriela brings together all of these threads alongside the experiences of over forty other people in a recount of grief that hits all the senses.

The script is incredibly beautifully written with effortless alternation between comedy and horror. The comedy brings us the triviality of the world jam championship and a recital of an alphabetical list of fruit. The horror brings us the reality of the feeling of interminable hopelessness that most of us will have experienced at some point.

The set is simple but makes excellent use of props with visual metaphors adding to the story. Gabriela starts the play stuck in a ladder, unable to get through it or go anywhere without it, like the emotions that she is experiencing. When she does free herself from it, she still finds herself stuck. The literal reason being due to the stacks of jam jars in her house, the emotional reason far deeper. Andrea Maciel’s direction of the plot is spellbinding, and the lighting (Madison Maycock) was entrancing, always amplifying the mood of the scene. Credit should also be given for costume design (Anouk Van Der). Flarys wears a white dress covered with red marks, but this could easily be a bloodied straitjacket.

The ending of the play feels slightly rushed and does not take the audience on the same journey that the rest of the show does. Gabriela’s conversations with her piano are an unnecessary addition, as she does a fantastic job of steering the plot by herself without needing to clumsily introduce an additional character.

However, that should not take away from a breathtaking performance from start to finish. Flarys and Maciel will struggle to match the level of drama and excitement in their next works, but I look forward to watching it.

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.

DELUGE

Soho Theatre

★★★★

“incredibly beautifully written with effortless alternation between comedy and horror”

DELUGE

Soho Theatre

Reviewed on 18th February 2025

by Luke Goscomb

Photography by Julia Testas

Recently reviewed at this venue:

DELUGE

DELUGE

DELUGE

EAST IS SOUTH

Hampstead Theatre

★★★

“The cast is superb and slips through the gears with unruffled confidence”

EAST IS SOUTH

Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed on 17th February 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Manuel Harlan

Previously reviewed at this venue:

EAST IS SOUTH

EAST IS SOUTH

EAST IS SOUTH