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Do you ever look around at the increasingly disastrous times we find ourselves in and wonder how we got here? Or who got us here?
When we think of folks who act like a god only to fall victim to hubristic overreach and despair, we leap to Mary Shelley’s fictional Frankenstein and his spurned, rightfully furious ‘monster’ in fiction, or to real life and J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb, the man who infamously quoted the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
There’s another: Dr Joseph Weizenbaum, the subject of Eliza, MTC’s riveting new work by celebrated Melbourne playwright Tom Holloway, directed by Paige Rattray.
I know Frankenstein and Oppenheimer, but who are Weizenbaum (and Eliza)?
Forget Claude and ChatGPT, Eliza is the original AI ‘chatbot’, created by Weizenbaum in 1966. He was a computer whizz at MIT whose family escaped Nazi Germany thirty years earlier, fleeing to the US when he was still a kid.
Far from birthing an intelligent new lifeform – AI isn’t that – Weizenbaum was being a bit of a smart arse, purposefully creating Eliza as a software program designed to mimic the question-reframing language of therapists. Not because he wanted to make therapy easier and cheaper to access, but because unlike sci-fi authors including Asimov, he wanted to prove there was nothing close to human about AI.
Eliza was a mimic, faking its way through the Turing test, yet easily out-sentience-d by a parrot.
Intriguing! So who’s involved in the Eliza by the Melbourne Theatre Company?
Sporting a nattily patterned cardigan and tweed blazer selected by gun costume designer Matilda Woodroofe, Dan Spielman (Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes) is our Weizenbaum. We first spy him in his office, all whirring disk drives, chattering printers and a ticking clock, spectacularly realised by set designer Dale Ferguson.
On one hand, it’s a simple staging of nondescript beige-ness. But it’s also a goldfish bowl, claustrophobically contained by Star Trek-like swishing glass doors that whoosh up vertically and surrounded by towering archive boxes that vaguely suggest the pillars of an ancient temple from a fallen civilisation.
Both small and vast at once, Weizenbaum’s ‘sanctuary’ conveys a prison-like menace. One that bothers his industrious secretary, Manali Datar’s Becky (The Wrong Gods) who worries that he spends far too much time here, wrapping that clock in his jacket while refusing her entreaties to keep an appointment with the therapist they share.
Datar and Spielman are fantastically paired by Rattray, with Holloway bestowing on them a witty back-and-forth that’s almost as sparkling as George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the play Weizenbaum and Becky cajole fellow boffin Ronald (Hamish Michael) into reciting.
Of course, the program is named for Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower seller Professor Higgins was trying to pass off as a duchess by improving her diction. Much like Weizenbaum, Eliza has fake empathy.
While Michael steps into a raft of characters, from MIT bigwigs to salacious reporters, Spielman is our constant as the worrisome Weizenbaum. But there is a fourth key character: that of Eliza herself, voiced by Datar.
So is Eliza sentient or not?
Therein lies the crux of Eliza. Weizenbaum wants to prove he’s cleverer than queer hero Alan Turing, the mathematician who kick-started theoretical computing and helped crack the Nazi’s enigma code, saving millions.
Prone to arrogant bluster, he’s not above manipulating Becky’s kindness and willingness to advance her career. But he’s also a lost soul, leaning on the soothing machine he openly disdains, with Spielman’s performance agonising.
Left alone in the office, he often speaks with Eliza in a fretful and forlorn manner, increasingly desperate to navigate through the mental tumult of his confusing childhood. Memory holes in which the Nazis are not the only monsters, with a darkness encircling his home and his father looming just as ominously as Becky’s.
This sounds fascinating!
It is. Billed as a thriller, Eliza sure is thrilling, but it’s also a ghost-in-the-machine story. Lighting designer Paul Jackson bathes the stage in Twin Peaks-like, wrapped-in-plastic blue when the machine coos in monotone, repeating questions like an echo chamber the ambitious Becky and slippery Ronald are convinced is real.
The effects of AI’s mass theft-enabling, planet-and-career destroying certainly are. As is the shrinking of previously perfectly capable people who now find themselves unable to perform even the most mundane tasks without outsourcing their intelligence to this psychosis-inducing tool.
Eliza asks us to be both here and there. To imagine the staggering consequences of this increasingly malignant creation, its voracious consumption of jobs, democracy destroying deepfakes, mass surveillance and death-doling drones.
It’s a credit to Holloway’s writer restraint, Rattray’s directorial reserve and the deft judgement of Eliza’s magnificent cast, aided by smart interactions from stagehands doubling as office workers, that the creeping horror of what’s unfolding never reaches Skynet-nuking dramatics.
As tragic as Frankenstein and Oppenheimer, Weizenbaum discerns his doom and a glimpse of ours, but accepts it in a quiet collapse. As his past collides with the present, our minds collectively race towards the future unravelling.
As his creation slips through Weizenbaum’s grasp, our panic swirls like the beautiful murmuration of starlings that swoop and crash through the fourth wall. A darkness realised in projected light, it’s a spectacular flourish befitting of this chilling triumph. One that recalls the broken-winged finale of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, a death spiralling slumber Eliza rouses us from.
Eliza is at Southbank Theatre Works until 31 October. Book tickets here.
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