'East is South' review — Beau Willimon's thrilling new play takes us on a wild ride through the world of AI

Read our review of East is South, starring Kaya Scodelario and Luke Treadaway, now in performances at the Hampstead Theatre to 15 March.

I’ve never before seen a play that ends with a New Zealand haka, the ceremonial dance so crucial to Maori culture. But East is South, the Oscar-nominated American writer Beau Willimon’s play in its world premiere production in London, more than once subverts expectation.

You might expect a show steeped in the world of AI – shades here of Lauren Gunderson’s Anthropology at this same address some 18 months ago – to be heavy on scientific lingo. Indeed, more than once I felt people shifting restlessly in their seats, trying to find a point of entry into material that remains specialised, at best, to most of us.

But the surprise here is an emphasis on religion amidst a 105-minute play, no interval, that could itself be called An Interrogation, were that same title not currently in use in Jamie Armitage’s tightly coiled three-hander in the Hampstead’s studio space below.

It so happens that the person whom we see under observation throughout is an American called Lena (Kaya Scodelario), a onetime Mennonite doing her best under lockdown to keep what sanity (and faith) she can as she is questioned about an AI programme, Logos; here is an indrawn polymath who knows about Chopin and the world of coding, as well.

Her lover, it seems, is a Russian, Sasha: a former dissident who happens to be fluent both in English and in the scientific advances of our challenging times. Played by Luke Treadaway, an Olivier winner back in the day for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Sasha gets an extended passage rhapsodising about Bach, which, both as written by Willimon and staged by Ellen McDougall, feels like a direct descendent of the comparable use of Mozart in Amadeus.

While the two debate the safety of furthering their romance, various authority figures populate the upper level of Alex Eales’s two-tiered set. (At the performance attended, the video design was not operational, so I can’t comment on its ability to help ground some fairly abstruse goings-on.)

Chief among them are Samira Darvish (Nathalie Armin), a Persian-American NSA agent who asks whether Logos might be able to “contaminate a diagnostic” – you got me on that one – and a gruff American (the ever-excellent Alec Newman), Tom Olsen, who of course is culturally oblivious with it: cue (presumably hilarious) confusion between the words haka and hockey. Olsen is revealed late on to be a nasty piece of work and ends one scene threatening to break a captive’s fingers.

The bulk of the speechifying goes to the Maori-Jewish (!) Ari Abrams, whose academic bent emerges in his love of the American university, Cornell, and its rough winters. True to type, the character relishes a use of stage as soapbox that at times seemed to confound the hard-working Cliff Curtis, the film and TV veteran – himself a New Zealander – here making a rare foray into theatre. (Abrams talks near the end of soon being “symmetrical”, which I presume is a good thing.)

I can’t say I always followed East is South – the title references a mantra tossed about at some length midway through – and I’m not sure what impelled the creator of the US version of House of Cards to set his sights on this terrain. That said, you have to admire a play that looks outwards towards our all-too-forbidding future and a cast clearly willing to take that journey wherever it may lead. Don’t go expecting a Hitchcock-adjacent North by Northwest and you may well find yourself going along out of keenness, yes, and growing curiosity with the ride.

East is South is at the Hampstead Theatre to 15 March. Book East is South tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: East is South (Photos by Manuel Harlan)