Eliza review – an ambitious, unsettling play about the birth of AI

Melbourne Theatre Company
While the cast is excellent, a play that sends us back to artificial intelligence’s genesis moment should feel more human than this

It can be fiendishly difficult to write plays about contemporary obsessions, not least because they can shift and mutate in the time it takes to mount a production. A clever solution is to set your work at the point in history where said obsession began; that way you can still create resonant theatre within more stable boundaries. Eliza, Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s new play for MTC, cleaves to this formula, focusing on the German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum and the firstlings of AI.

Weizenbaum (Dan Spielman) is working at MIT in 1966 with colleague Ron (Hamish Michael) and secretary Becky (Manali Datar) when he comes up with a programming language that arguably represents the birth of artificial intelligence – although he’d be the first person to argue it doesn’t. Weizenbaum creates a program that mimics the language and tone of psychoanalysis, parroting phrases and asking open-ended questions of the “how do you feel about that?” variety. In this way, he aims to debunk Alan Turing’s theory that machines may one day learn to think.

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