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158

I don’t have one, but I know vaguely what they are. One of them is called “Alexa” and they usually perch conspicuously on a table top above the detritus of your suburban living room. You are meant to utter commands to them like “boil the kettle” or “run a bath.” You will have conversations with them that are always interrogative and disagreeably unbalanced, in being lively only on one side:

“Who wrote that play that I saw earlier?”

“Luke Culloty.”

“Oh right. And who played the main role?”

“Luke Culloty.”

“It’s malfunctioning again. I said who PLAYED the MAIN ROLE?”

“Luke Culloty.”

“Hmm, well, maybe he did. What was the venue called again?”

“The Space on North Bridge.”

Culloty’s “Artificial” envisages a future in which these devices have a ready human intelligence and, if not necessarily consciousness, then an undetectable counterfeit. His character Dom is a technician who visits clients’ homes and undertakes psychological evaluations in order to programme the most compatible AI for them. Meanwhile, in his own home, he lives in a bickering companionship with an AI named Kurtis (Fred Woodley Evans), who has a lot of sass and gives a lot of lip.

Kurtis sounds so cheerfully human that you might uneasily think of an informal slaveholding household in the Antebellum South. With these AIs, we are still in around about the early 1810s, years before abolitionism. They are not exactly robots but small, coloured ornamental lamps. It demonstrates that you do not need C-3PO to lumber on stage to produce some deep and imaginative sci-fi at the Fringe. In plays such as “Artificial,” a very little is made to go a long way.

Ninety minutes is a long time at the Fringe – several days in human years – and still this play could be shorter. Yet unlike some previous professional and audience reviews that I have seen, I am inclined to rate Culloty’s performance highly. Dom is a vivid creation: dorky, mumbling, sweet and wretched. He is permanently on stage, so that “Artificial” becomes four fifths a one-man play. He is rather like an oak tree in the middle of the drama, with the rest of the cast as birds that flutter sparingly around his branches. The play is particularly thrifty in its deployment of Emily Cundick, an obviously resourceful comic actress.

Some enjoyable ironies are explored and clarified over the course of the drama. Dom is meant to be the story’s psychologist but he is being constantly bettered in this field by Kurtis, a being that might not even possess genuine empathy. Although Dom is supposed to engineer the happiness of countless families, he is so selfish that he dwells entirely within his own personal culture, with his AI composing the Muzak that he listens to on his outdated I-pod. Such self-containment is in itself ominously robotic – unlike AIs, we are expected to have a working society.

Lovelorn after a divorce, Dom develops a creeping distrust of love possibly because of his familiarity with AIs. He comes to believe that love is a purely mechanical impulse, a surging in the human circuitry. If he commits to his sadly-happy old friend Adams (Stella Richt) or the spookily calm Eva (Maja Laskowska), who is clearly bad news, then could he ever authentically connect with these lovers? Or would he just love “the idea” of them, in the same way that an AI is compelled to engage with data? The squalor of Dom’s situation is that we might suspect him to be already perfectly content with Kurtis, a fun but mutable philosophical zombie who he has manufactured to complement his own melancholy personality. Doubting in his own empathy, and conscious of the programming behind his own psychology, Dom’s breakdown is at heart a blurring of the distinction between man and machine.