Disruption at the Park Theatre – review

A play exploring how Artificial Intelligence is threatening to achieve global dominance might have seemed prescient a decade or so ago, but in 2023 it mostly feels terrifying, although it’s often pretty riveting entertainment. Billed as a thriller, Andrew Stein’s Disruption plays out more like a superior American soap opera (it’s set predominantly in New York), albeit one with an unsettling relevance to the way we all live now. It receives a darkly flashy staging by Hersh Ellis in this world premiere.

Entrepreneur Nick (Oliver Alvin-Wilson) is trying to get his less wealthy old university friends to invest in a business tech project he and his alarmingly ruthless sidekick Raven (Sasha Desouza-Willock) have created, which effectively maps out people’s best lives for them. Using AI, Nick has pinpointed their respective Achilles heels and the trajectories their personal and professional lives should follow. Disruption is a mostly gripping, admirably clear look at the ethics of data harvesting, the twilight world of tech and algorithms, and the pitting of personal morality against the money-driven obsession with “smarter, better, faster”.

In a stunning central turn, Alvin-Wilson plays Nick as a combination of swaggering energy, simmering, possibly chemical-induced, rage, and boundless confidence, underpinned by moments of hollow-eyed despair when what’s left of his conscience kicks in. Equally terrific is Nick Read as one of the targeted friend group, nice guy Paul, whose cuddly, family man exterior belies despair at his failing marriage and an unexplored yearning for a co-worker. Read invests him with zany humour and an endearing eagerness to be liked, tempered with quiet desperation, in a beautifully wrought study of a man whose life is on the brink of seismic change. The first act scene where Nick lays bare Paul’s dissatisfactions and deceits is, from a human point of view, the most interesting in the play, and both actors acquit themselves superbly.

Meanwhile, fiery psychoanalyst Suzie (a magnificent Debbie Korley), partnered with college lecturer Ben, arguably the most vulnerable of Nick’s long-term friends (Nathaniel Curtis, initially puppyish but shading convincingly into distress) mistrusts Nick while surgeon Barry (Kevin Shen) and his photographer wife Mia (Rosanna Hyland, note-perfect) are struggling to buy a Brooklyn brownstone, so need to make money fast. Stein spins these plot strands together with real skill and creates punchy, nicely turned dialogue. The relatability of the characters casts AI’s inexorable, unnerving intervention in their existences into an especially sinister light, especially when it becomes clear that the technology is already several steps ahead of Nick and Raven.

Intimate scenes for two play out with the rest of the company onstage as though to demonstrate that in the virtual world, privacy isn’t a given: there’s potentially always somebody eavesdropping or watching. The excellent first half gives way to a slightly less satisfactory second which sacrifices some of the pace and urgency of what has gone before, making one wonder if the script might benefit from losing about twenty minutes of material and the interval, thereby slimming down to a sleek, dynamic one act.

Ellis’s production looks dizzyingly fabulous (Robbie Butler’s lighting, Daniel Denton’s video design and Zoë Hurwitz’s glossy set collectively scream expensive hi-tech meets stylish imagination) and moves at a compelling pace. A couple of the performances tend towards the shrill and imprecise however, and the staging, dazzling as it is, often seems to have been conceived for a proscenium arch rather than the Park’s open stage, which causes sightline problems for audience members in the side sections. Also rather bizarre is the apparent conviction that the best way a woman can demonstrate emancipation from a loveless marriage is by turning up at friends’ parties dressed like a Blondie tribute act.

If Disruption isn’t as sophisticated in execution as it is in intent, it’s still an absorbing piece of theatre where human interest and decidedly non-human ingenuity cohabit uneasily, with intriguing dramatic pay-offs. The balance between examining the relationships and marriages of the people caught in the spiderweb of unwillingly shared online information and the apparently all-encompassing desire for more and yet more money, and the dehumanised, intrusive but brilliant AI that helps facilitate all that, doesn’t feel quite right, but it’s very watchable.

Nick gets a speech at the conclusion where he compares Artificial Intelligence’s connection to real actual life, to the way the invention of the light bulb altered our relationship to darkness. It’s a neat, thought-provoking point, charismatically put over by Alvin-Wilson, but the content of this play suggests Nick knows that this is all flannel, and the truth is much more complicated and unsettling. Chilling stuff.