To Be a Machine (Version 2.0): A whole lot of reality
Viewed through a VR headset, this play allows you to become an actor.
Smock Alley Theatre - Dublin Theatre Festival
★★☆☆☆
Where do we go to get away from it all? To escape the nervous tension of everyday life, and find a peaceful way of being present? One destination, we hear early in Dead Centre and Mark O’Connor’s play To Be a Machine (Version 2.0), is the theatre. It’s a switch-off that’s the gist of every preshow announcement: “Please turn off your phones.”
On a stage resplendent with a red curtain, an actor makes a subtly persuasive case that theatre is actually the place where technology heightens our experience of the world, with lighting and sound narrowing our focus in an otherwise distractable world: the innovations of stage design. In performance, Jack Gleeson has the same affable, soft-spoken delivery as he did in (Version 1.0), where he played O’Connor himself, encountering the real-life entrepreneurs of the writer’s 2017 non-fiction book – people who strive to enhance their bodies through technology, by implanting biometric scanners in their arms, etc. Here, Gleeson seems to be playing a version of himself, a recognisable actor wrapped-up in the escapism of performance to try become someone else. He traces the etymology of “virtual reality” to a description for theatre itself, used by French playwright Antoin Artaud in this 1938 essay collection The Theatre and its Double, before suggesting the impossibility of being completely present during a play because your mind will inevitably drift to other matters, to how to spend the rest of the evening, and so on. “You’re not immersed enough,” he says.