Disruption
Park Theatre | ★★★★✩

Hot button issue plays tend to be written in a rush. Urgent subjects such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and climate change have been the subject of many a rapid-response work by playwrights hoping to surf a wave of public interest or, less cynically, share their own concern.

But among such duds as the infamous Seven Jewish Children, in 2009, and the National Theatre’s all but forgotten Greenland, in 2011, there occasionally comes a play that is properly insightful about the subject everyone is talking about, which in this case is AI.

Written by American property developer and sometime playwright Andrew Stein, Disruption takes its name from the mantra adopted by many tech companies that set out to make things that have been done for millennia, such as eating, travelling or communicating, to be done much faster, smarter and better.

026 1Disruption Oliver Alvin-Wilson Pamela Raith Photography

Oliver Alvin-Wilson (Photo: Pamela Raith Photography)

It is a well thought through piece that reflects that there was nothing rapid about Stein’s play, which took four years to write.

Here the start-up is an AI algorithm that can do something no one has ever done before: predict exactly how to be happy.

It hoovers up the data of a person’s life and then predicts with absolute accuracy the decisions that will make them happy, whether it be leave their wife, persuade a partner to have a child, or invest one’s limited money into the new AI company that has this superpower instead of buying the house of your partner’s dreams.

These are the bespoke options offered by the start-up’s co-founder Nick (Oliver Alvin-Wilson) to his old friends. His patter is that he is cutting them in on an opportunity of a lifetime.

However, the truth is that he and his scarily ambitious partner Raven (Sasha Desouza-Willock) who looks like an intern but is an MIT graduate with doctorates in applied mathematics and artificial intelligence, are using Nick’s friends as an experiment to prove the effectiveness of their algorithm.

If successful, the company will be a gateway trough which every individual can achieve their aspiration.

See? AI is not all mass murder by robots. Though in Stein’s vision of the very near future it may be AI that is deciding which aspiration is best for you.

Hersh Ellis’s well-acted production conveys complex arguments while Zoë Hurwitz’s slick design is dominated by a giant screen of constantly calculating computer codes, which looms over the unwitting human guinea pigs.

051 Disruption Pamela Raith Photography

A scene from Disruption (Photo: Oliver Alvin-Wilson/Pamela Raith Photography)

As a psychiatrist and AI sceptic Suzie, Debbie Korley is outstanding. But everyone here pulls their weight.

Also excellent is Nick Read as reluctantly married Paul, a print magazine editor who personifies the doomed non-digital world.

Those who arrive thinking that AI is something they can opt out of like social media will realise there really is no escape.