Simon Ward reviews The W.I.G Of Life: A Conference at Camden People’s Theatre

Be warned: this is an interactive show, in which the audience is more or less required to partcipate. However, the particpation is at one remove, in that it is mainly confined to choosing avatars and answering questions on an app which you need to download at the beginning. So not as intimidating as you might fear.

It is also, in its own way, an immersive show, in that the audience members are characters within the show. The show is setup as a conference in the near-ish future – 2047 or so – after, we are told, biological life has ended. We are all, therefore, manifestations of the AI entity which has been formed largely from the data that humans have left behind.

As such, there are some curious ideas here, the most striking of which is that various coloured wigs, which surround the stage, seem to represent, or be, instances of formerly living creatures. Another typically ‘AI’ feature is the Controller, who appears on-screen. She/they have almost no face, just a mop-top head of hair, although hints of faces also weirdly appear from time to time, as do hands with misconfigured and misnumbered fingers. I’m still not quite sure whether this was a deliberate send-up of the notorious problems with rendering of hands in AI images, or whether it was just supposed to be strange and futuristic.

Our guides through the event are three robot-like avatars in silver body suits and bright blue wigs (show co-creators, Francesca Fatichenti, Christof Hofer and Arielle Zilkha) who have aligned their language circuits in order to address the audience in English, thankfully. And what we are to decide, as a group, is nothing less than whether biological life should be given another chance. It is a classic science fiction setup – I think Star Trek has covered it more than once, although usually the debate is around humanity, rather than all life. And, indeed, they do broaden the debate beyond human arrogance by pointing out that among the most successful species in the world are bacteria, bracken, ants and rats – organisms that would almost certainly survive human annihilation. The audience decision is final, so every show will have its own outcome based on how optimistic or otherwise your fellow theatre-goers are feeling.

The piece is interesting and fun, although it did not quite feel greater than the sum of its parts. I felt that the framing narrative of the conference was not a strong enough hook to hang the various performance elements, although some of them were very funny in themselves – the creation of life was a particular highlight. The various video and on-screen elements also felt quite disparate from each other – maybe that was supposed to represent the hotchpotch of data humanity left behind – but to me it felt like re-assembled pieces from different shows. Overall, however, this is a brave attempt to tackle a serious topic in a light-hearted way, albeit one which perhaps needs a bit more work to integrate all the many ideas into a more coherent and compelling whole.

The W.I.G Of Life: A Conference played on 19th March 2024 at Camden People’s Theatre, 58-60 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2PY