“A sharply written and surprisingly unsettling comedy about what happens when we ask AI how to feel.“
“No one wants to admit they’re holding onto something worthless.”
Artificial intelligence. The two words seem to have become a permanent fixture in
our collective consciousness in the last three years – and for good reason. The
technology has permeated every aspect of our everyday lives from streamlining our
workloads, curating our fitness programmes and now providing us dating advice?
This new and somewhat creepy frontier is explored in Diana Hognogi’s new play
‘You Matched With…’, which is playing at the Etcetera Theatre in Camden. The
romcom features Em, played by Evangeline Beaven, who has found herself in a
spiral of unsuccessful dates which she relays to ChatGPT for its analysis. The large
language model eventually goes rogue and begins to resurrect composites of her
previously ghosted romantic partners as ‘Romantic Accountability Avatars’. The
ensuing play becomes somewhere between ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘2001: A Space
Odyssey’, with Hal turning into the ghost of Christmas past.
Director Hannah O’Reilly successfully manages to balance comedy with the more
candid moments, steering her cast through tonal shifts that could easily have felt
jarring but instead feel earned.
However, the undeniable star of the show is Evangeline Beaven, who carries the
play with considerable skill. Her Em is neurotic and self-aware in equal measure –
funny enough to generate real laughs but vulnerable enough for the audience to
genuinely root for her. She is matched well by Alex McCaragher’s ChatGPT, whose
deadpan delivery of yes-man platitudes and trite affirmations grows increasingly
unsettling as the play progresses. As the play goes along, his composed robotic
facade begins to crack in what is one of the production’s most effective moments,
transforming what could have been a one-note comic device into something
altogether more nefarious.
The ensemble cast of avatars also shine. Andrew Friedman, Frankie Wade and Jude
Alp deliver Hognogi’s sharp writing with excellent comic timing and candour in equal
measure. Each resurrected ex arrives with his own brand of emotional damage
packaged in the familiar cliched language of modern dating.
You Matched With… arrives at exactly the right cultural moment. As AI inches further
into our emotional lives, Hognogi leaves her audience with an uncomfortable
question about what we actually want from human connection — and whether we
have already unintentionally outsourced it. Based on this tightly written and
thoroughly entertaining hour of theatre, she is a writer well worth watching.