Upload yourself to the theatre for To Be a Machine - Financial Times

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If you woke up this morning with a bad back you may have cursed the frailties of the body in which you live. You may have hunted down a painkiller to limit the impact on your early morning meeting. You may have sighed as you contemplated your rumpled self in the mirror, resolved to lose weight or get a new haircut to hide the ravages of time. But could you be tempted to escape that body altogether? To upload your mind into a more reliable vessel, to exist as computer code or to freeze your fresh corpse in the hope of living on as a more perfect self?

Such are the dreams of some of the individuals in To Be a Machine, Mark O’Connell’s 2017 Wellcome Prize-winning book. It’s a vivacious, often funny, always gripping account of his foray into the curious world of transhumanism, during which he encounters highly driven men (mostly men) who seek to outrun the Grim Reaper and escape the indignities of ageing through advanced technology, such as cognitive augmentation or cryonics.

Now the book is a play. And not only that — it’s a play that mirrors its subject, inviting you to attend in person by sending in your disembodied self via video. To Be a Machine (Version 1.0), which opens (live-streamed) shortly at Dublin Theatre Festival, features actor Jack Gleeson, playing the bemused O’Connell while around him 110 audience members flicker on multiple iPad screens. That’s certainly one way to beat the traffic.

The show was originally going to be more conventional: a piece with multiple actors and a physically present audience that explored the friction between the transhumanist desire to free ourselves from our flaky bodies and the fact that live theatre depends on — rejoices in — bodies in a room. Then the pandemic intervened. The resulting solution feels curiously apt, playing with the idea of what theatre “without the hindrance of the body” actually means.

“I don’t want to say it’s fortunate because that’s not the right term,” says O’Connell down the line from Dublin. “But it seemed an opportunity to do something new and different in keeping with the moment that we’re living through and also in keeping with the themes of the book.”

Mark O’Connell, author of ‘To Be a Machine’

“We were planning to use the presence of bodies in the theatre to access the journey into transhumanism,” adds co-director Bush Moukarzel. “But you can approach it from the inverse. If our bodies have suddenly been characterised as biohazards, if sitting in a room becomes a transgressive act, that is a new way to be aware of our bodies.”

What a year ago might have been intellectually interesting — the idea of posting yourself to a venue as an online avatar — will now have real bite. We’ve all lived the experience of conducting life virtually and, thanks to the susceptibility of the human body to disease, seen the vast expansion of technologically assisted life in every area. Theatregoers have grown accustomed to accessing drama via live-streams and Zoom links. The pandemic has accelerated the role of software and algorithms in our lives, perhaps advancing us towards the tech-utopia that many transhumanists seek.

But while tech has enabled life to carry on, it has also made us realise how important bodily presence is to us. The tensions in the book, says O’Connell, now coincide with that larger tension: “Bodies in a room is now a romanticised possibility: it’s something we yearn for.”

Onstage these ironies mesh with the very nature of the art form — live drama is both physical and ephemeral — and the fact that much of theatre’s job from the get-go has been to grapple with mortality and, in one sense, outwit it by being revived. As far back as c1599, Hamlet was pondering the nature of “this quintessence of dust” and lamenting the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”. Hamlet’s creator may have died, but his Danish prince lives on in countless “uploaded” iterations.

It's a medium too that makes a sympathetic study of the frailties of humanity — the very frailties that a “perfect” human might surmount. Jeopardy is part of theatre’s DNA, says Ben Kidd, who co-directs with Moukarzel: “The stories often contain people making terrible mistakes, people dying, people dealing with mortality. But also, during the performance itself, somebody may forget their lines.”

Indeed the possibility that something might go wrong is woven into the whole enterprise. Meanwhile, the question that haunts the book — “would it be me?” — has sprung into new life on stage. In rehearsals O’Connell has watched himself take shape as a new entity in the hands of Gleeson (“the character of ‘Mark O’Connell’ is an uploaded version of me into Jack,” he says), raising all sorts of questions about which Mark O’Connell has been uploaded. One day, asked to explain a line his younger self had written, he was unable to do so.

“I can no longer put myself back in the person who wrote that line,” he says. “For the most of the entire first day we just tried to pick that apart: am I the same person who wrote the book? There’s an obsession with selfhood which grows out the idea of uploading oneself. Would it be you? If you took your brain material and uploaded it to a machine would it be you? And in fact are you still the same you that you were seven years ago, given that the body replaces its cells on a seven-year cycle?”

These questions about identity are meat and drink to theatre, says Moukarzel. “The basic premise is that somebody walks on stage and says, ‘Hello, my name is Hamlet.’ And the audience goes, ‘I know you’re not, but I’m going to do a bit of doublethink’.”

This combination of old and new, the idea that tech-assisted perfectibility picks up on preoccupations that have dogged literature, philosophy and religion for millennia, is one of the ironies that O’Connell explores in To Be a Machine. “We exist, we humans, in the wreckage of an imagined splendour,” he writes. “As long as we have been telling stories, we have been telling them about the desire to escape our human bodies.”

That is the real heart of the book, he says: “Yes, we’re talking about these very extreme, very futuristic ideas. We’re talking about, in some senses, a radical break with the entire history of humanity. But really what this expresses is something that is fundamentally human, that has always been at the centre of how humans have thought about themselves in relationship to the world and mortality. It’s the humanity of transhumanism that’s really interesting to me.”

At Dublin Theatre Festival, To Be a Machine joins a raft of other shows that explore identity, connection and solidarity, often straddling the real and digital worlds. It's a programme born of necessity, but it’s important, says artistic director Willie White, that the work is both live and hopeful: “To Be a Machine absolutely takes that on . . . this is a theatre festival and it’s a very theatrical idea.”

Given the subject matter, however, it’s only natural that To Be a Machine might regenerate. “The show is called To Be a Machine (Version 1.0),” says Kidd. “And we are definitely thinking of it as an iteration that is a response to the moment. Very much in line with the way the tech industry releases different versions of their products, we hope this project might evolve and respond to another type of world in the future.”

Dublin Theatre Festival, September 24-October 11; ‘To Be a Machine (Version 1.0)’, September 30-October 10, dublintheatrefestival.ie

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