To Be a Machine (Version 1.0) review: The first major streamed play is here

An adaptation of writer Mark O'Connell's book about encountering members of the transhumanism movement brings classic illusion to streamed theatre. Photo: Ben Kidd / Dead Centre

Dublin Theatre Festival

★ ★ ★ ★ 

In this agonising era of separation, in which most plays are viewed alone through a screen, how can theatre resist being subsumed into the omnipresent, everyday flow of streaming media? 

Despite innovations like substituting the audience with the camera eye, or using the back-and-forth of videotelephony to hot-wire an interactive play, the energy of assembly is harder still to recapture. In their new streamed play To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), co-produced by Dublin Theatre Festival, Dead Centre and Mark O’Connell recognise this loss as pathos. There is potential in a play about how we miss sitting in a theatre together. 

Adapted from O’Connell’s non-fiction book of the same name, this is a fascinating tale of a travelling writer encountering members of the transhumanism movement. From the empty auditorium of Project Arts Centre, Mark (Jack Gleeson) recalls entrepreneurs devoted to enhancing their bodies through technology. Think of a biometric scanner implanted in your arm. (Or directing your eyes into a screen to resurrect some lost sense of theatre). 

As an early version of a future play, not everything seems fully baked. For instance, there isn’t all that much that sends Gleeson’s affable, shirt-tucked Mark into his extraordinary quest. Nor does everything he say land as confidently as it is delivered. “They say theatre is a dying art form. I like to think of it as a place where people are dying together,” says Mark. Come again? 

Mark may be better taken as a narrator, ushering in the transhumanism disciples who are the pillars of the story. In other hands this could be something esoteric, like hearing from a roundtable of theorists, but Dead Centre have been transforming philosophy into enchanting, ludicrous mises en scène for the greater part of a decade. There’s a stunning moment when directors Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd reverse the camera shot to show one bio-hacker’s vision of leaving the human body. There, in the darkened stalls of the theatre, an audience of iPads are seated in rows, displaying our faces. 

Whether disembodied or corporeal, we watch Mark share compelling ideas about where humanity is headed. One futurist foresees human minds being uploaded into cloud storage. Conjecture gets powerfully delivered as metaphor, as an auditorium of sleeping theatregoers evokes the strange slumber of cryogenically frozen bodies somewhere in an Arizona desert facility.  

Alive to classic inheritances, the smoke and mirrors of a stage, this is the first major streamed play of the genre. Moukarzel and Kidd, aided by video designer Jack Phelan’s miraculous displays, seem to have mastered the electronic media that much theatre now regularly imitates, but channel it into the self-reflexivity of contemporary theatre. 

Even Jack Gleeson gets a moment to confront himself, a former child star seizing an opportunity to finally become someone else. If Jack and Mark’s struggle for dominance, playing out the tensions between being upgraded and being replaced, isn’t fully mapped, we can hope it’ll come in Version 2.0. 

The play’s resonance is better summed up in a scene about the story of Gilgamesh, an ancient mythic king whose body was so ravaged by grief, he went on a search for immortality. Storytelling too is a kind of uploading, transferring us into something else. To be an audience, perhaps. We kind of were.  

Until 10th October.