If you're able to get into London over the next few weeks and you appreciate the works of John Whitbourn, one of the truly great writers of English fantasy and horror, you should check out his play He Was A Bugger But I Loved Him, renamed Labelled With Love (why?) as part of a double bill at the Old Red Lion Playhouse. Get your tickets here. There are no interdimensional pathways, no malicious fays, no macabre twists in reality -- but there's a deeper kind of fantasy in the mysteries of love and memory, and that's what's on display in the drama.
Theatre might be a new calling for Mr Whitbourn. He recently completed another play, The Hunt For Blunt, about Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. Blunt turned out to be a Soviet spy, the so-called Fourth Man, and went to ground at Watts Gallery in Surrey when his cover was blown. That's where the play is set and where, with luck, it will be staged.
Picking up from last time, another entertainment use for AI will be in staging plays that we otherwise wouldn't get to see. Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, for instance, which Coleridge regarded as one of the three "most perfect" plots in all of fiction. (If you're anything like me you'll immediately need to know that the others were Fielding's Tom Jones and Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus.) You can find amateur versions online like the one above, but no fully staged production. Likewise for many plays of Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Stoppard, Coward... The list is endless.
To illustrate: lately I've had a hankering for the plays of Martin McDonagh, but just reading them isn't enough. I want to see them performed. Until now, if all you had was a script or audio file, the only way you could see a performance was if somebody went to the trouble of animating the whole thing by hand, the way the BBC did with "The Power of the Daleks" having (curse them) wiped the original videotapes.
With AI, animation of a play no longer need take a dozen-strong team working for months on end. It can be improvised on the fly using the script. With a little set-up the AI could even base the performances on digital twins of famous actors from history. It could also help to make movies that are considered too niche or too expensive for traditional production.
If the last couple of posts haven't exhausted your interest in AI, it's one of the topics I recently discussed with Riccardo Scaringi on his podcast. We also talked about Blood Sword, Fabled Lands, Dragon Warriors, Elon Musk, Vulcanverse, Cthulhu 2050, Shadow King, Jewelspider and the films of Woody Allen, so there's plenty there for the non-AI buffs:
I appreciate that using AI for entertainment is mere frippery compared to the applications in healthcare, environmental measures, materials science, energy technology, and pure science. And beyond that, and far more important, is the eventual role of strong AI not merely as a new human tool but a whole new companion species. But on the way there a little digital alchemy won't hurt.
