Writer: Thomas Melle
Director: Stefan Kaegi
In the movie The Princess Bride, whenever one of his foolproof plans goes awry, the Machiavellian Vizzini murmurs “Inconceivable!”, until his sidekick Inigo gently murmurs “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” In the Battersea Arts Centre’s performance space, Thomas Melle’s animatronic avatar keeps describing some action by the machine, attempting to replicate a human action, as “Perfect”. He keeps using that word. It doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.
The animatronic avatar of Thomas Melle sits on a chair, flexes its fingers, waggles its foot, and delivers a lecture that is in part reflections on replication, and in part a biographical sketch of Alan Turing, the pioneering computer architect. Turing also devised The Turing Test to determine if one is conversing with a person or a programmed machine, and few members of the audience would have been in any doubt that the ‘speaker’ was a machine and not a person. As a substitute for an actor, there was remarkably little evidence of the quirky, responsive, individualised responses to situations that make acting worth the watch. Ponderous, glacially slow, indifferent to audience responses, it wasn’t even a facsimile of bad acting. There is a short display of crude disco lighting from a computer controlled stage light, and the animatronic Thomas Melle suggests that that it is a demonstration of theatre’s ability to manipulate emotion through lighting effects. Theatre can and does use lights to manipulate emotion, and music and special effects and all sorts of things, but a spotlight bouncing up and down to a disco beat isn’t any of them; it has the emotional impact of an interactive car display at Euston.
So what was the point? The simulacrum that did an impression of a not very interesting lecturer was not very interesting. The exploration of things a machine can and can’t do was timely. The answer to the question ‘Can a machine show empathy?’ is ‘No’. The best moment was a computer joke when the animatronic Thomas Melle rotated its prosthetic foot through 360 degrees and asked ‘Could the real Thomas Melle do that?’. It sounded a bit smug, though that could have been projection.
The piece is directed by Stefan Kaegi, a Berlin-based theatre maker who co-produces works with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, under the label Rimini Protokoll. Their stated purpose is ‘to pry apart the sense of reality and present all its facets from unusual perspectives’, and that goal is achieved. They have created a theatre-machine that does pretty much everything an actor can do, apart from the stuff that matters. Rigid, unengaged, non-responsive acting forcefully demonstrates why acting needs to be supple and engaged and responsive. That is possibly worth discovering. And the robot can twist its foot through 360 degrees. Could Ralph Fiennes do that?
Runs until 26 February 2022
