Skins and Hollywood star Kaya Scodelario (making her adult stage debut) and Luke ‘Curious Incident’ Treadaway lead a cast of six whose characters act as proxies for the whole human race but seem only mildly distracted by the existential crisis unfolding.
Look, I know theatre can’t have a cast of thousands like Andor, but if six characters – no, five and a half: no, four and three quarters - are expected to carry vast swathes of human experience in the face of doom, they should at least be imbued with credibility and urgency.
Lena’s mentor on the philosophy of tech, a Jewish Māori and sometime Oxytocin addict called Ari (Cliff Curtis), also turns out to be a government spook, albeit one with strong views on the significance of the Haka in New Zealand culture.
When a security alert is triggered by an apparent attempt to override the kill code, the two are interrogated by Samira (Nathalie Armin), an American-born Iranian lesbian Sufi from the National Security Agency.
The frustrating thing, apart from the waste of acting talent, is that Willimon’s thoughts on AI – human tech-zealots creating a deity that could annihilate us – seem tantalizingly profound.
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