If I hadn't known some of Ian Dixon Potter's previous works, I'd be tempted to be more critical towards his most recent play The Test.
His strong interest for the extreme boundaries of science has already featured in Tiresia, in which he mentions the processes used by the human body to store knowledge and memory. Another common factor in his plays is the introduction of big ethical questions, which in Boy Stroke Girl focuses on the relative role of gender identification and in Tiresia on the implications of a brain transplant. The Test, instead, elaborates on the controversial influence of Artificial Intelligence on human dynamics.
In this short but language-heavy performance, the main character is Dora (Natasha Killam), an ambitious female scientist, author of the first AI system provided with an autonomous consciousness. Contravening the instructions of her direct superior (Zara Banks), Dora decides to submit her device, called Mother, to the Turing test, which aims to establish its ability to respond to stimuli following the same behavioural pattern of a human. To do so, she needs free access to the whole internet and, for this purpose, she hires Josh (Duncan Mason), a computer hacker fresh out from prison.
