MTC's 'Eliza' stages Weizenbaum and the birth of the chatbot

Dan Spielman plays Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in 1966, building a program that parrots a psychotherapist and watching his colleagues fall for it. That is the premise of Tom Holloway's new play 'Eliza', directed by Paige Rattray at the Melbourne Theatre Company's Sumner theatre, reviewed in the Guardian by Tim Byrne.

Byrne writes that Weizenbaum "aims to debunk Alan Turing's theory that machines may one day learn to think", and that instead "his colleagues and superiors become enraptured by the idea that this program…understands them." The play's thesis, Byrne argues, is blunt: "the issue isn't that machines will think like us (they can't), but that we'll believe they do."

The production tips from naturalism into something closer to Kafka. Dale Ferguson's set, Byrne notes, "with its seemingly endless rows of white file boxes and spinning wheels of machinery, evokes the maddening prison". Hamish Michael plays Ron and other figures; Manali Datar plays Becky, the secretary whose private life bleeds into the program's test transcripts.

Byrne is not uncritical. As the piece slides into psychological horror, he writes, the characters "become cyphers and, as the narrative starts to take on the familiar contours of psychological horror, they become less interesting." He still calls 'Eliza' "a noble and often very funny attempt to wrestle with one of the major preoccupations of our time." It runs at the Sumner until 31 October.