Anthropology review – clever AI missing-person mystery

Hampstead theatre, London
Lauren Gunderson's smart play finds a software engineer creating a digital version of a sister who has disappeared

While screenwriters strike, partly over the threat from artificial intelligence, playwrights are busy writing about AI. Lauren Gunderson's Anthropology is the second world premiere in a week featuring pseudo-humanity - after Alan Ayckbourn's Constant Companions - and the third such London play in six months, following Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime and Andrew Stein's Disruption. (Hermione Lee's biography of Tom Stoppard intriguingly reveals that he began but abandoned an AI play before writing Leopoldstadt.)

Gunderson, an American whose I and You was a 2018 Hampstead success, creates Merril, a software engineer, whose sister Angie has been missing for a year after failing to reach home one night. From the phone, laptop and online footprint the young woman left behind, Merril sculpts a virtual Angie. The early scenes are a Merril duologue with a disembodied voice, like a digital Krapp's Last Tape, but Gunderson and director Anna Ledwich sensibly open up this closed circuit so that we see three, or by some counts four, others.

At Hampstead theatre, London, until 14 October