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ELIZA’s Adventures in the Uncanny Valley was written by Eugene O’Brien and Gavin Quinn, and was performed in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin and produced by Pan Pan Theatre. The play explores the combination of technology and biology; it is an experiment that tries to redefine the conceptions of what it is to be “human” and how artificial intelligence interferes or modifies natural human characteristics. Due to the basic programming of the characters, they begin to ask some profound philosophical and existential questions. The natural and artificial intelligence collide, with what is real and what is created becoming one. Scrutinizing what is real or illusion, artificial or not, subtly mirror the myths and Greek and Roman plays– in a modern or maybe even futurist spectrum.   

The audience is left to decide which character is human and which one is merely a creation. This can be absorbed and understood on many different levels– not only in a natural or artificial circumstance, but also the idea of mirroring something and thus, forgetting one’s true essence when one becomes completely reproduced and recreated because of external interference. Presumably, the abstraction of the play could also be intertwined with our own contemporary reality: we are constantly using technology, almost one hundred per cent of the time on some sort of electronic devices and forgetting how to do things naturally or mechanically. Maybe we should asks ourselves sometimes what is it to be “human” in our contemporary and technological society. After all, it is not an absurd idea that some of the purest human sentiments are lost due to the need of portraying a created reality on social media.

In conclusion, here is an example of a performance that shows how theatre is a magic-box and how the audience needs to play with it, use their imagination, and most importantly: think and consider some crucial dramaturgical concepts and link the dots with the real world. At the end of the play, the audience learns that artificial intelligence does interfere the human condition and characteristics negatively. Thus, ELIZA’s Adventures in the Uncanny Valley does leave the audience with some interesting thoughts.