Cliff Curtis, Kaya Scodelario and Nathalie Armin in East is South at Hampstead Theatre. Credit Manuel HarlanAn alarm has gone off at an ultra-secure subterranean facility and two suspected accomplices have been separated for questioning. What starts out as a scene involving the gentle interrogation of a young female computer code writer Lena (Kaya Scodelario) who may, or may not have done something unthinkable in the course of her duties, develops into a more far reaching exploration of people, their belief systems and what they do to cling onto them.
Cool-as-a-cucumber intelligence officer Samira Darvish (Nathalie Armin), is assertive yet measured in her questioning. She manipulates by the book, partly because she wrote it and deviation from the process and protocols is not something she entertains. Time is of the essence and despite a need to be thorough, she is impatient. Meanwhile, the senior academic on the team Ari Abrams (Cliff Curtis) a part Māori non-practising Jew, confounds with his theoreticising diatribes but cannot decide whether he believes Lena’s claims of innocence — especially when it is revealed that she and colleague and fellow suspect Sasha (Luke Treadaway) have been having a forbidden affair. He was a dissident who suffered torture at the hands of his Russian masters but now lives a life of comparative freedom in America by deploying his computing skills to the benefit of his new masters, the National Security Agency. But the triggering of the alarm in response to the detection of an unauthorised Trojan script, has turned everything on its head.
Initially, the intellectualising in Beau Willimon’s play directed for Hampstead by Ellen McDougall, creates something of a cat and mouse situation which genuinely feels as though it will lead to unchartered territory. The audience is fed red herrings in a bid to encourage overthinking — which would become the subject of heated assertions over an interval drink, if this were a play which had an interval, which it doesn’t. We question whether Lena and Sasha are possibly the victims of the super intelligent computer into which they have been feeding code, or whether something else is at play, but the denouement when it finally arrives after much proselytising is marginally disappointing.
The piece explores some initially interesting considerations, tapping our well-founded Damoclesian fears about AI and the terrors it could potentially unleash. The characters are reasonably well drawn, including a cliched military bully (Alec Newman) who unmasks himself as a second rate intellectual but a tenacious adversary who’ll get the job done. His comedic exchange with a largely insignificant desk flunky (Aaron Gill as the technician) proves one of too few moments of levity in an otherwise potentially dynamic yet ultimately existentially stodgy drama.
