REVIEW: The Diviners at Golden Goose Theatre 10-28 October 2023

‘a show to go to with a friend and discuss afterward’ ★★★ ½

The press release for People Show 145: The Diviners calls this devised piece “strangely topical.” It is certainly strange. The topicality may rest entirely in the paratextual explanations of what we are seeing. As the website, program, and press release inform us,  the characters we see interact with each other in ways that do not seem quite human are “broken A.I. entities.” They are never described in this way in the play. The press release tells us they reside in a world “not so far from our own.” But how far it is remains unclear. The characters are machine-like in some ways: they have to be reset by having a blanket draped over them when they malfunction. How they are supposed to function, and what relation they have to humanity (are they created by humans, do they create humans, how many humans even exist in their universe?) is much less obvious. The title itself, “The Diviners,” foregrounds the importance of uncertainty. Are the characters “diviners” in the sense of guessers? Or prophets? Or are they “diviner” than us in some way, as in more godlike?

A spate of recent plays about A.I. tread similar ground (I was reminded of Neil Weatherall’s ‘Do iPhone Dream of Electric Sheeple?’) but in ways more grounded in this world’s relationship to A.I.: how humans use it, are used by it, maybe without knowing it. This piece, on the other hand, drifts farther away from real-world statements. There are moments when the A.I.s seem to invent (or anticipate? Or cause?) war, politics, and climate change. The message may be that not even machines are free from human foibles, but the fact that we never know for sure that the figures we are watching even are machines, or what kinds of machines contain or bring about their intelligences, makes this a strange and almost frustrating piece to try to pin down. Its topicality is the free-floating topicality of fable, which can be applied to a number of situations without explicitly referring to any in particular. The pleasure of plays about A.I. is often in their moments of dislocation from the world as we follow a computer’s hallucinations, its lack of the cultural conditioning that tells humans what does and does not make sense. But this play is all hallucination and no context.

That said, the piece itself is bracingly unusual, often funny, and well acted by Fiona Creese, Gareth Brierley, George Khan, and Sadie Cook (and a different guest artist each show). And there is something very refreshing in emerging from a play entertained but puzzled. It’s a show to go to with a friend and discuss afterward – and there is certainly a lot here to try to puzzle out.

The Diviners, Golden Goose Theatre, 10-28 October, People Show, https://www.goldengoosetheatre.co.uk/whatson/145:-the-diviners

Reviewed by Clio Doyle