East is South at Hampstead Theatre – review

East is south, west is north… the cryptic title of Beau Willimon’s new AI-themed drama is presented as a mantra that isn’t supposed to make sense but it’s very difficult indeed to feel involved throughout this frustratingly scattered piece of work about whether religion and AI can co-exist. To bring such abstract concepts to life requires sharp writing and a light touch but this play crucially lacks a human touch and narrative clarity – almost as if a vague outline and key terms were entered into an AI playwriting programme, with this as the result.

Set in the Logos office, a secretive facility presumably in the middle of nowhere, represented by Alex Eales’ starkly sterile two-storey set design, young coders Lena (Kaya Scodelario) and Sasha (Luke Treadaway) have been developing ‘Aggie’, a code more powerful than any other that has come before. They have anthropomorphised their creation and, it seems, activated it. The office goes into lockdown and Lena is put into solitary confinement and denied access to the bathroom before being subjected to rounds of questioning. If she plays nicely, explains Agent Darvish (Nathalie Armin), everything will be fine.

Willimon is certainly capable of telling a story – he’s an Oscar nominee for The Ides of March as well as being creator and showrunner of Netflix’s House of Cards, and currently a writer on Star Wars spin-off Andor – yet this suffers a surfeit of intellectual posturing at the expense of narrative.

Director Ellen McDougall does her best to invoke a sense of urgency but is fighting a losing battle with an impossible script in which any advances in plot or character development are hampered by heavy-handed biblical references and philosophical dithering. The most waffly speeches go to Cliff Curtis’s professorial Ari, a jovial figure with a depressive streak who isn’t ideally suited to this cut-throat corporate world.

The office comprises a Russian atheist, a Maori Jew, a Sufi Muslim and a Mennonite escapee, all of whom have left their faith or were never observant in the first place – and there’s also Agent Olsen (Alec Newman) who identifies purely as “American” and is happy to engage in a little torture.

In her professional stage debut, former Skins star Scodelario gives the production’s most rounded and sympathetic performance as Lena, a former Mennonite (a Christian sect that eschews modern technology) with a dark past. Sasha (a Zuckerberg-ish Treadaway) gave up his dreams of being a pianist when he realised that he would never be the best in the world, and their romance begins when he talks her through an early work of Bach with its sublime peaks and fearsome divine judgement. It’s contrived but at least demonstrates human emotion.

It’s all too far-fetched to provide much insight as to how AI can affect real life and, for a thriller, there isn’t a great deal of plot. Surely there’ll at least be a huge twist at the end, perhaps engineered by Aaron Gill’s largely silent Technician, the most lowly member of the team? No such luck; the denouement is all-too predictable.