There is something faintly cheeky about making a play focusing on Artificial Intelligence and then asking an audience to switch off their phones and sit beside strangers in a theatre venue to watch live performance in real time. That, however, is where An Echo in the Void begins to get interesting.
This new Edinburgh Fringe thriller takes place inside an experimental programme designed to help people cope with bereavement. It can recreate voices and convincing simulations of the dead. Four strangers enter the system hoping for some kind of comfort, only to discover that the technology has been paying rather close, unnerving attention to them and their grief.
Adam Sinclair, known for films including the 2011 adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy, plays a former soldier living with post-traumatic stress disorder. The character finds himself caught inside the programme. The small difficulty is that the programme has begun forming opinions about what its users need.
“It’s maybe a fraction of a step ahead of what’s about to come,” Sinclair says.
Going back to where it started
Sinclair initially signed up for The Echo in the Void to work with director Jason Weiss, with whom he had previously worked after spending around twenty-five years away from the stage. During those years, Sinclair has built a steady career across television and film, where actors can rely upon close-ups and multiple takes to convey the nuances of their characters’ behaviours.
Theatre offers fewer hiding places. “There’s a lot of tricks in television that we use and we hide behind,” he says. “Stripping it back to the basics of theatre was something I wanted to challenge myself with.”
The opportunity to work on An Echo in the Void coincided with Sinclair’s growing interest in spending more time back in Scotland. Having lived in America for more than two decades, he had begun noticing how much the Scottish screen industry had changed. Productions were arriving familiar locations were turning up in blockbuster films, including, most recently in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Returning to Scotland meant looking again at a country he had partly left behind, and Edinburgh offered an obvious place to do it. He had watched shows such as Fleabag and Baby Reindeer make the journey from Fringe stages into a much larger cultural life. He had never performed at the festival himself, despite training at what was then the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. The omission had begun to bother him. “I decided I think I want to go back into a play at the Edinburgh Festival,” he says.
The phone knows something
When Weiss showed him the early version of the play, Sinclair noticed that its subject was becoming difficult to avoid. “Every time I opened my iPhone in the morning, I read the news,” he says. “Everything seemed to be about AI and how AI was taking over.”
The play doesn’t present AI as a clanking mechanical villain but, instead, offers something more difficult to refuse. It understands loss and can reproduce the gestures of someone who has died. “If something can convincingly give you back what you’ve lost, would you refuse it?” asks the play.
Sinclair believes audiences will recognise the unease because most already live with less dramatic versions of it. A person mentions a product over dinner. The next morning, an advertisement appears. Nobody remembers searching for it. The phone sits nearby looking innocent.
“It’s not reading your mind,” Sinclair says, before offering an explanation that is not especially more comforting. “It’s so in tune with you, it knows all your information.”
A very human luxury
The play’s live setting also gives Sinclair an enjoyable contradiction to work with.
“How funny that we’re making this very big message about AI, but we’re presenting it in a live theatre format,” he says. “How ironic, right?”
That matters to Sinclair because he thinks direct human contact is slowly becoming something people purchase deliberately rather than encounter naturally. Concerts cost more than streaming. Therapy and life coaching provide sustained attention in a culture where attention is becoming difficult to secure. Nightclubs disappear while online spaces remain permanently open.
“The human connection is actually becoming more expensive,” he says. He compares it to artisanal bread, which is essentially ordinary bread that has acquired good lighting and a confident price tag. “We’re paying to take a step back.”
Four actors and no emergency exit
Staging this kind of story without the visual machinery of film might seem difficult, although Sinclair believes the simplicity works in the production’s favour.
“It’s a bare stage,” he says. “There’s nothing onstage.” Four actors perform straight through for an hour, without breaks or elaborate scenery. The audience supplies the rest.
The production can therefore suggest more than it shows. “People only go to the stage and they recognise themselves,” Sinclair says. His reference is to the idea that performance becomes powerful when viewers find their own behaviour reflected inside it. Comedy works that way, too. An audience laughs because something onstage feels uncomfortably familiar.
Letting the play misbehave
Weiss will remain with the production for only the opening nights before leaving the actors to continue the run. Sinclair is looking forward to seeing what happens without the director in the room.
He expects the performance to shift as the cast finds new meanings inside the text. Certain lines may begin to feel different after twenty shows. The balance between humour and unease may change according to the audience. “I guarantee halfway through I’m going to say a sentence one night and go, ‘Oh God, that’s what it really means.’”
Slightly less plugged in
Sinclair hopes audiences will leave thinking about the amount of themselves they hand over to technology each day. He wants them to notice their phones differently.
“They’re going to walk out of that and take a second look at their phones,” he says. “They’ll think twice about it.”
An Echo in the Void runs at Assembly Roxy Upstairs from 5 to 29 August, excluding 19 August. Performances begin at 4.40pm and run for approximately sixty minutes.