While I was watching Tom Holloway’s play Eliza at the Melbourne Theatre Company, I found myself musing on crudity. Jeremy Prynne – a poet no one could accuse of being simplistic – once told me theatre is too crude. He’s correct – but it’s also true that theatre’s crudity is one of its virtues.
“Crude thinking” (plumpes Denken) is what Brecht called the crystallisation of thought that permits it to be translated into action, part of the process that for him constituted a critical theatre. This was implacably posed against “bourgeois theatre”, which for Brecht seduces its audiences into passive identification and illusion, “hang[ing] up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”.
Eliza, developed through MTC’s NEXT STAGE Writers’ Program, is a vivid example of how virtues are double-sided. Its crudity is, if anything, anaesthetising. All dramatic works are forced to simplify – or better, crystallise – any complex ideas with which they engage, but this production merely reduces them. At first I thought that was down to the writing. Then I read the play.
Few things feel more of the moment than the rapid development of AI, and more disturbing than the plausibility of large language models (LLMs) in creating simulacra of human communication. Holloway critiques AI’s more troubling aspects by going back to its roots six decades ago, when a chatbot was being developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with some helpful funding from the United States defence department.
The play follows the development of the first “natural language” software, ELIZA, named after George Bernard Shaw’s character in Pygmalion, and its creator, Dr Joseph Weizenbaum (Dan Spielman). A chatbot created in the mid 1960s, ELIZA prefigures today’s LLMs and other forms of AI that now rule our digital lives. One of its first manifestations was a script called DOCTOR that borrowed from Rogerian non-directive psychotherapy, reflecting language back to the questioner and encouraging them to offer more information, which proved extraordinarily seductive to those who talked to it.
“I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with the DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it,” Weizenbaum wrote in 1976. “What I had not realized [was] that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
Eliza’s action revolves around Weizenbaum’s relationships with his real-life secretary, Becky (Manali Datar), and a presumably fictional assistant Ronald (Hamish Michael, who also plays a number of other small roles, including a reporter, a psychologist and Marvin Minsky, MIT’s AI lab co-founder). We follow Weizenbaum’s increasing unease about his program, which correlates with his declining mental health. Becky, Eliza Doolittle to Weizenbaum’s Professor Henry Higgins, here is credited with the idea of using therapy-speak for ELIZA and, although she’s a layperson, is involved in its programming.
Rather than expanding written ideas into a theatrical cosmos, the production drives metaphors home so hard that they lose their potency.
Under Paige Rattray’s direction, Eliza is given a handsome production with a top-notch technical team. Dale Ferguson’s set is a stylised lab with data banks stretching to the back of the stage and a small playing space at the front. The whole is lit with chilly restraint by Paul Jackson and given ominous sound by Kelly Ryall, the monochromatic effect leavened by Matilda Woodroofe’s colourful ’60s costumes. It looks gorgeous but ultimately does little more than illustrate – and in some cases even obscure – the text.
The play opens in a liminal space in which Weizenbaum is speaking to a disembodied, affectless voice, examining his childhood trauma as a refugee from prewar Nazi Germany and his troubled relationships with his parents. These imagined dialogues recur through the play and are emblematic of its confused dramaturgy: aside from the final dialogue, which features an actor onstage, it’s all but impossible not to assume that Weizenbaum is speaking to a machine.
In Holloway’s text the dialogues are differentiated, although, aside from the final scene, they mostly lack the human to-and-fro that characterises Rogerian therapy. Weizenbaum talks to two psychotherapists (C and T) as well as – once – to ELIZA, but this is by no means clear onstage. This ambiguity profoundly confuses the argument of the play.
It swiftly becomes clear Weizenbaum is deeply sceptical of the therapeutic effectiveness and ethics of the chatbot – as were many psychologists at the time, one of whom said it was a perfect example of how not to do Rogerian therapy. It’s jarring to see Weizenbaum, who elsewhere rages against AI replacing human understanding, credulously marvelling over how his maybe-bot’s non-judgemental responses permit him to articulate difficult truths. Why is this man using this very technology to probe the most intimate conflicts of his psyche?
Perhaps the aim is to demonstrate how difficult it is to tell the difference between the artificial and human dialogues? If so, it feels disingenuous: as the play is also saying, there is a difference, not only in the corporeal presence of the therapist but also in the motion of the therapy itself.
Rather than expanding written ideas into a theatrical cosmos, the production drives metaphors home so hard that they lose their potency. A major motif concerns birds – they represent discovery, freedom, ambition, the sublime world beyond the human. A predatory company named Starling appears to be spying on Weizenbaum’s work and, as its power grows and the scientist’s mental health collapses, the corpses of starlings drop onto the stage.
In a central sequence, Weizenbaum invites his colleagues to a concert of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, famously written in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, which uses birdsong in the score. Here Weizenbaum’s unavailing attempts to explain the ineffable to his colleagues become merely exposition. This scene is the occasion for a wordless coup de théâtre that somehow ends up literalising the language rather than liberating it. It aims for the poetic, but what we get is spectacle.
This mounting incoherence emerges from a production uncertain of its aesthetic, for which it relies on design. It never truly grapples with the play’s language. This is conveyed through a kind of received naturalism that’s reinforced by the actors’ diction, which I found distracting. Spielman performs Weizenbaum with a German accent, while the other cast members move across a number of regional American accents. Maybe inevitably, the performances, assured and deft as they are, never quite land – they are neither the “psychologically rounded” portrayals of naturalism nor heightened theatrical creations. Weizenbaum, for instance, ends up not so much a passionate and troubled intellectual as the cliché of a mad scientist.
In the 1960s there were lively debates about what AI meant for human intelligence and culture. What’s interesting about those arguments is how contemporary they feel – as is the case with most current crises, we’re rehearsing the same talking points over and over again. Yet Eliza ends up being less interesting than either its protagonist, Dr Joseph Weizenbaum, or the ideas it discusses.
The conflicts between the scientist and his colleagues are broadly between pragmatic techno-optimism and an Asimovian belief in scientific progress and Weizenbaum’s pessimism, informed by the broken Europe he left as a child, which led him to believe that the power promised by technology could only lead to servitude and impotence. Eliza ultimately reduces these debates to a sentimentalised humanism fighting back a philistine scientific cabal corrupted by capitalism.
It’s not that simple. The AI pioneer Minsky, for example, is presented as a buffoon. The real Minsky was a talented musician – one of few who could improvise fugues – and wrote about the connection between music and the mind. I missed the livening sense of contradiction: it’s as if all difficulty were smoothed out to frictionless spectacle. Reader, I was bored.
Yet Holloway’s text does venture complexity. There’s a gap between the writer’s ambition and the aspirations of the staging that ultimately comes down to a failure of connection between the two. It’s a damned shame. If art is to make its case against AI, it has to be much more than plausible. We need the intellectual and emotional ferment that creates real feeling. We need goosebumps.
Eliza is playing at Southbank Theatre, Melbourne, until October 31.
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