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

EAST IS SOUTH

The Dumb Waiter

Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed – 8th December 2020

★★★★

“keeps the signature ambiguity of Pinter’s work on the front burner”

It is fitting that Harold Pinter’s “The Dumb Waiter” should re-open at Hampstead Theatre exactly sixty years after its London premiere on the same stage; then called the Hampstead Theatre Club, housed in a parish church hall. This anniversary production was scheduled for March of this year, but an extended Pinteresque pause (caused by you-know-what) pushed it into the theatre’s winter programme. Its themes are befitting too: the two characters in the play are playing a waiting game, with mystifying and contradictory information drip fed to them from on high.

Holed up in a bleak, oppressive and windowless basement are two gunmen. Silence stretches across the first few moments, rich in meaning. Ben reads a newspaper while Gus ties his shoelaces. Ben flicks a page of the paper while Gus walks to the door, then takes his shoes off, one by one, to take out a flattened cigarette carton and matchbox. They are both useless. Later on, an envelope is mysteriously delivered containing a dozen loose matches. Why? Moments like these puncture the absurdism to reveal a darker, more ominous side to the writing in Pinter’s earlier works.

Alice Hamilton’s sensitive and stark direction enhances the sense of foreboding whilst still allowing the comedy to shine through. But the onus is on the performances. Alec Newman, as Ben and Shane Zaza, as Gus, are a cracking, Cockney double act. They brilliantly handle the vaudeville rhythms of the dialogue, lulling us into a false sense of security with poetically mundane humour before delivering a punch. Ben wants Gus to light the kettle, but Gus explains that you don’t light the kettle; you light the gas, then boil the kettle. The banter has a hilarious drunkard logic to it, but you can feel an undercurrent bubbling away. Ben appears to be keeping a lid on something and Newman perfectly evokes the strain of trying to stop it boiling over.

Both Newman and Zaza capture immaculately the balance of power and dynamics in their relationship. Although not quite the protégé, Gus still sees Ben as his mentor. An odd couple, testing each other, talking over each other, with Ben repeatedly calling the shots. And forever in the background is the dumb waiter itself, from which, bizarrely, food orders are delivered as though they are in a restaurant’s basement kitchen.

But the ‘dumb waiter’ could also be either of the two characters. Like in like Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”, this is an absurdist comedy about two men waiting in a universe without meaning or purpose. But they’re not as dumb as they look. They play the comedy against the menace, the familiar against the unfamiliar, with an ambiguity that keeps you guessing.

How much does Ben know? Who is the victim? Or are they both victims of a higher order? Puppets even – with somebody else pulling the strings – both low down in the pecking order. Although Ben is slightly higher up, he is still just a follower of orders, and the symbolic crashing down of the dumb waiter is the hand that forces him to carry them out. Or does he?

A short, one act piece that keeps the signature ambiguity of Pinter’s work on the front burner, but also a deeply personal play about betrayal that is given a touching and human face by this fine acting duo.

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

Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed – 8th December 2020

★★★★

“keeps the signature ambiguity of Pinter’s work on the front burner”

A short, one act piece that keeps the signature ambiguity of Pinter’s work on the front burner, but also a deeply personal play about betrayal that is given a touching and human face by this fine acting duo.

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Helen Maybanks

The Dumb Waiter

Hampstead Theatre until 16th January

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