To Be a Machine (Version 2.0) review: This compelling, paradoxical production is more than a clever meta-exercise

To Be a Machine (Version 2.0)

Boys’ School, Smock Alley Theatre

★★★★☆

Watching a production from Dead Centre theatre company makes you think about thinking, questioning everything you see and hear. From a play without any actors (Beckett’s Room) to last year’s semi-improvised Good Sex, Bush Moukarzel and Ben Kidd’s playfully original work tests expectations of reality and theatrical illusion.

To Be a Machine (Version 2.0) takes the audience further into an experiment they began in 2020. Working with the author Mark O’Connell, it explores the possibility of transcending the body through technology, based on his fascinating book of the same title. For Version 1.0, created during lockdown, the audience joined remotely, our faces projected into an empty auditorium, for a presentation about transhumanism; this time we are seated in a small circle to experience something that is both live and not live.

Questions arise as soon as each audience member puts on a virtual-reality headset and earphones, isolating us from each other. Is everyone watching the same thing? How do I know? When someone touches me gently on the shoulder, I assume it is part of the show. The actor Jack Gleeson comes into view in the headset, standing in front of a stage curtain, welcoming us to an immersive performance that will ensure that we are fully present. This, he insists, will be “real”, as the camera is then trained on us, changing the perspective so that we experience his day through his eyes, his voice in our head.

[ Dublin Theatre Festival: Full coverage ]

In Version 1.0, Gleeson as narrator was suffering from “a serious case of the human condition”. That condition has deteriorated here, with Gleeson the actor ducking out in the middle of a performance to walk the streets of Temple Bar, unable to connect with anything. Hailed by people he doesn’t recognise, he mumbles that he doesn’t feel himself. “Who among us?” is the enigmatic response from characters he meets, played by the excellent ensemble cast.

How Ireland drinks now: Teetotallers, wine-o’clockers and ex-drinkers

---

Mark Moriarty: two 15-minute meals made easy, with a few simple tricks

---

Every time I travel abroad I am gripped by the fear that Ireland is making a fool of me

---

A personal housing plan: Move to Newry, buy for €150,000 less, commute to Dublin

---

Seeking painkillers for a headache, he is advised to come back when he is not in pain, although it is possible that time may never come. As it progresses, this compelling, paradoxical production becomes more than a clever meta-exercise reflecting on acting and performance. As Gleeson’s character meets his double, an actor played by Jack Gleeson, the tone changes. His experience of dissociation turns to distress as he encounters his ex-girlfriend (Caoimhe Coburn Gray), who left him because he had checked out of their relationship; he is unable to be present.

The company’s technically sophisticated creation of a virtual day in the life asks questions about the construction of our identity: if Jack can’t remember anything and does not feel “himself” or “present”, how does he know who he is? Can virtual reality help him to merge with someone else’s consciousness, not “to be a machine” but to be human, to be more alive? Ironically, the section of this performance that is actually live rather than prerecorded feels the most artificial; theatrical even. Though that is surely part of the point.

To Be a Machine (Version 2.0) continues at Smock Alley Theatre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, until Sunday, October 8th