Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s latest work, titled Eliza, opened with the Melbourne Theatre Company this season. The drama is set in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during 1966 and follows German-American computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum as he develops one of the first programs now recognised as a precursor to artificial intelligence. The production aims to locate the origin of modern AI within a historically fixed moment.
Weizenbaum, portrayed by Dan Spielman, creates a software routine that imitates the language of psychoanalysis, echoing patients’ statements and posing open-ended queries such as “how do you feel about that?”. His stated goal is to challenge Alan Turing’s claim that machines could eventually think. Instead of a triumph, the prototype quickly attracts the fascination of colleagues and supervisors, who begin to treat it as a responsive interlocutor.
The staging, designed by Dale Ferguson, features rows of white filing cabinets and rotating mechanical wheels that suggest an endless bureaucratic maze. Paul Jackson provides a clinical lighting scheme that buzzes over the stage, recalling the ambience of a data centre. Director Paige Rattray guides the three performers with a brisk tempo, allowing the play’s exaggerated shifts to unfold without lingering on overt sentiment.
Midway through the narrative, the tone tilts toward the absurd as characters adopt erratic behaviours; Weizenbaum conceals a clock in his jacket and later expels bird feathers onstage. The production draws visual inspiration from Orson Welles’ film adaptation of Kafka’s The Trial, echoing the claustrophobic office of Josef K. The set’s endless file boxes reinforce a sense of imprisonment that mirrors the characters’ psychological descent.
The Guardian review observes that the play’s unsettling style keeps the audience from assuming superior knowledge, instead highlighting the core anxiety that belief in machine understanding can outpace actual capability. It notes that the surreal approach sometimes reduces the characters to symbols, distancing viewers from their humanity as the story veers into psychological horror. The review quotes the production’s central claim: “the issue isn’t that machines will think like us (they can’t), but that we’ll believe they do.”
Holloway’s script blends influences from playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, yet its ambition lies in confronting a contemporary preoccupation with artificial intelligence. By dramatizing the moment when humans first grappled with the promise and peril of machine mimicry, the piece argues that the danger resides not in autonomous cognition but in the illusion of it. The production therefore serves as a theatrical probe of the ethical tensions that continue to shape AI discourse.