![]() Throughout The Made, Alice is the target of criticism from just about everyone. Bruce is superb from scene one, portraying Alice’s arc over the course of the show with humour and emotion. Yet Perkins has a keen awareness of pace and establishes character and relationships swiftly and effectively, as does the cast. I missed her presence in the latter half of the play and almost wished we could have seen more of her journey and relationship with creator Alice, who loves her while recognising she’s an “appliance”. Tasker-Poland, who doubles as the show’s movement director, is hypnotically convincing as Arie, emphasising her halting gestures and speech while investing her with sweetness and (albeit unwitting) sass. She tells assistant John (Joe Dekkers-Reihana) that it is their responsibility to treat her well because how they treat her is who they are. There is the central question: how to fill her with more than simply happiness, and should we? In Arie’s naive state, Alice is reluctant to present her to a public that would only use and abuse her. We are told that she cannot feel love because for that she would need to understand the world. A former sexbot Alice reworked in her zeal to create empathetic AI, Arie can so far only ‘feel’ happy. This is hapless Arie (Hannah Tasker-Poland), manipulated by the company that had just purchased the rights to her. But while Alice and Nanny Ann are the initial focus, our attention is pulled to Alice’s first creation in the background. Colin McColl’s direction and Eden Mulholland’s inventive sound design alongside Rachel Marlowe and Brad Gledhill’s bold lighting make this play out like a mad scientist’s fever dream. That is, until she springs up off of her lap, eyes alight with the realisation - “You are not my mother, you are my creature!”Ĭue a thrilling, loud and visually spectacular sequence in which Alice resurrects Nanny Ann and goes beyond anything she’s done with AI before. For a moment, Alice finds reassurance in Nanny Ann (Brownyn Bradley), the outdated robot she made to look after Sam while they were growing up. ![]() Scientist Alice (Alison Bruce)’s personal and professional life are on the rocks: her work on artificial intelligence has been rejected for funding, her ex-husband David (Peter Daube) shows no signs of wanting to reconcile and her adult child Sam (Murdoch Keane) has dropped out of university to pursue drug dealing – all in the wake of the death of her difficult mother. The ‘creation scene’ in Emily Perkins’s The Made happens not at the beginning but roughly the halfway point. It may be one of the strongest images in our collective pop culture consciousness: Frankenstein’s monster rising from the operating table – the product of a young man playing god now set to wreak havoc on the world.
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