ChatGPT reviews A Streetcar Named Desire, Scottish star Bethany Tennick, and three shows to see next week.
Can AI write about theatre? Plus a chat with the lead in recent hit musical A Mother's Song, and more.
Hello, and welcome to The Crush Bar, a weekly newsletter about theatre written by me, Fergus Morgan.
This is the second issue featuring a fancy new format, one that involves a short bit of analysis or opinion - or just a bit of fun - plus a short profile of an emerging theatremaker, and three shows to book tickets for. This week: an attempt to get ChatGPT to write a theatre review, an interview with Bethany Tennick - star of Islander and A Mother’s Song - and shout-outs for Rafaella Marcus’ Sap, Kandinsky’s The Winston Machine, and Goblin Theatre’s The Lost Spells.
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That’s all for now. See you at the bottom.
Can ChatGPT review A Streetcar Named Desire?
You will know all about ChatGPT by now. It is the online chatbot developed by California-based tech company Open AI that has provoked a lot of discussion since it was launched in November. The tool has designed logos, written short stories, composed music – and both amazed and upset a lot of people.
Earlier this week, I attended an online talk about artificial intelligence and its impact on journalism, and it got me thinking. Could AI replace me? Could ChatGPT, say, write a review of a theatre show? Could it do it in my writing style, even? Should I start looking for another job immediately?
So, I loaded up ChatGPT and asked it: can you write a review of A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida Theatre - a show I did not see - in the style of renowned and respected theatre journalist Fergus Morgan. The early results were not great. It kept saying that Leo Bill was brilliant as Mitch, when Leo Bill is not even in the cast. And, to be completely frank, it did not really know who renowned and respected theatre journalist Fergus Morgan was either. Heartbreaking, I know.
After I fed it some more information, though – the correct cast and creative team, plus the fact that renowned and respected theatre journalist Fergus Morgan is a chronic over-user of alliteration, for example – the results started to improve. After about half an hour of wrangling, this is what it arrived at:
Rebecca Frecknall's ravishing revival of Tennessee Williams' classic, A Streetcar Named Desire, at the Almeida Theatre is a compelling and captivating production. Patsy Ferran delivers a remarkable performance as Blanche DuBois, with a mesmerizing mix of melancholy, madness, and mystery. Paul Mescal, known for his role in Normal People, is magnetic as Stanley Kowalski, showcasing both his brawn and bravado.
Frecknall's direction is dazzling, creating a dreamlike world that captures the play's themes of desire, desperation, and decay. The production design, by Madeleine Girling, is gorgeous, with a faded grandeur and eerie elegance that evokes the fading glamour of the Old South. The lighting design, by Lee Curran, is striking and heightens the production's atmosphere, creating moments of both intimacy and intensity.
Overall, A Streetcar Named Desire at the Almeida Theatre is a triumph, with Ferran and Mescal leading an outstanding cast. The production is a potent and poetic portrayal of Williams' timeless play, exploring the destructive forces of desire and the fragile nature of human sanity. This is a must-see production that will leave you breathless and bewitched.
ChatGPT has arrived at that – with some poking from me – by surveying thousands and thousands of theatre reviews, including those recently published of A Streetcar Named Desire, and generating something that reads similarly. What do you think?
It isn’t terrible. It uses a lot of alliteration, as requested, and it uses words like “compelling”, “mesmerising”, and “dazzling”, like a lot of theatre reviews do. It is in the present tense, too, like most reviews should be. “Patsy Ferran delivers a remarkable performance as Blanche DuBois, with a mesmerizing mix of melancholy, madness, and mystery” is exactly the sort of thing I might write, come to think of it.
It isn’t great, though, is it? The prose is bland. The descriptions are, well, non-descript. There is no hint of the play’s plot. And there is a severe absence of humour. It reads a bit like that letter Joey writes after reading a thesaurus in Friends. I would never use the word ‘overall’ in a concluding paragraph, either. Never, ever, ever.
Will AI ever be able to write decent theatre reviews? Unlikely. More factual articles like news stories and obituaries? It already is. Interviews and features? Probably. Reviews, though? I think not. Why? Well, although AI is already able to fulfil a lot of the function of reviews – basic contextualisation and basic description, for example – it lacks the ability to express a genuine emotional response. All it can do is imitate.
In January, Nick Cave wrote the following in response to ChatGPT’s attempt to write a song in the style of Nick Cave:
“Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience.”
The same, albeit in perhaps less grandiose terms, could be said of theatre criticism. ChatGPT can tell you who the star of a play is. It can copy another critic’s opinion of that star’s performance. But it cannot know the human experience of sitting in an auditorium, watching that performance unfold, experiencing its impact. “Songs arise out of suffering,” says Cave. I can confirm that theatre reviews often do, too.
There is a common philosophical counter-argument to Cave, though: one that contends that human intelligence is merely accumulated experience anyway, just like artificial intelligence. In theatrical terms: what was Michael Billington if not a vast store of theatregoing experience, and what were his reviews if not products of that experience? Does Quentin Letts even experience human emotion? Maybe we are all just advanced versions of ChatGPT, anyway. Well, some more advanced than others.
Who knows? I don’t. I’m not a philosopher. I’m not even a theatre journalist, as far as ChatGPT can confirm. Overall, I think I’d better leave the last word to the chatbot itself, who knows a lot more than me about these things. ChatGPT, can you have a genuine opinion about a theatre show? Will AI start writing theatre reviews?
While AI can provide analysis and data-driven insights, it is unlikely to completely replace human theatre critics. Theatre criticism involves not only analysis of the performance, but also a creative interpretation of the work that takes into account its emotional impact and the unique perspective of the critic. AI lacks the nuanced and creative perspective of a human writer and may not be able to fully capture the essence of a theatrical performance. Therefore, while AI may be used to supplement theatre criticism, human theatre critics are likely to remain an essential element of the theatre industry.
Phew. Safe, then. Thanks ChatGPT.
Meet Bethany Tennick, rising star of Scottish musical theatre.
There are exciting things happening in musical theatre in Scotland – and Glasgow-based performer Bethany Tennick is right at the heart of them. Only recently, she has starred in two stellar shows: Babs, Morna Young’s hour-long, one-woman adaptation of the Baba Yaga myth, and A Mother’s Song, the stunning new folk musical from composer Finn Anderson and director Tania Azevedo.
A Mother’s Song, I wrote in my five-star review for The Stage, is “an ambitious, expansive, evocative show about music and motherhood that brims with heart and history.” And Tennick, I added, “delivers a powerhouse performance” displaying “an astonishing voice that is ethereal yet earthy.”
“Something magical happened with A Mother’s Song,” says Tennick. “Finn and Tania have been working on it for five years, and they have really poured their heart and soul into it. It felt really important for them, and for Scottish musical theatre, too. And it felt monumental for me. It felt like a real step up. I’ve never been challenged like that as an actor before. I really hope we do it again.”
Tennick grew up in a military family, and so moved around a lot as a child. “I’m a patch brat,” she says. “I grew up in York, Bicester and London, Germany, Kenya and Cyprus.” She attributes her musical talent and astonishing voice to the fact that her parents were musicians, too. “My mum is a soul singer,” she explains. “And my dad is into prog rock, which my mum calls musical wanking.”
Tennick did not see much theatre growing up, but discovered musicals in high school, and consequently decided to train as a performer. She graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2018 and finally felt like her feet were on firm ground. “I didn’t have much control over my life growing up,” she says. “After I graduated, I was able to actually decide where I wanted to be and what I wanted to do. I decided to stay in Scotland because I’d fallen in love with the culture.”
Tennick’s career started taking flight immediately – like, immediately – after she left drama school. Only a few hours after her graduation from RCS, she was auditioning for Islander, Anderson’s haunting, live-looped musical steeped in Hebridean folklore. “It was my first ever audition,” Tennick says. “Or maybe my second. I think I had done one before that went absolutely miserably.”
Tennick got the job, and starred in the show – alongside Kirsty Findley – in its original Scottish tour in 2018, in its hit run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, in its London transfer to Southwark Playhouse later that year, and in its off-Broadway run in New York in 2022. During its London transfer in 2019, Tennick also appeared in her first film. She had a minor role in Michael Caton-Jones’ Our Ladies.
“I was feeling quite pleased with myself, and then the world collapsed,” Tennick says. “I ran out of money and I had to clean houses for six months. I know most people have to do something like that straight after they graduate. It was just a bit delayed for me, as I had quite a lot of luck straight away.”
Tennick has bounced back since the pandemic, though, touring the brilliant Babs – for which she also wrote the music – with A Play, A Pie and A Pint, and starring in A Mother’s Song, a mightily moving, centuries-spanning folk musical about motherhood and migration, which only ran for four nights at Stirling’s Macrobert Arts Centre in February, but which will surely return in fully-fledged form soon.
She is making her own folk musicals with director Fraser Scott and writer Iona Ramsay, too, under the aegis of Kick The Door, the production company they founded together in 2018. 2021’s Thread was about two sisters living in Paisley. 2022’s Land was a time-hopping tale about intergenerational relationships. The company has made a few short films, too, one of which was screened at Cannes.
“We are planning on doing an autumn tour of Land,” says Tennick of her plans. “I’m working and waiting on some other projects, too. And I really hope A Mother’s Song comes back soon, too.”
Three shows to see next week
Sap - touring, until May 27
Sap was one of the biggest hits of last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. A two-hander, written by Rafaella Marcus, directed by Jessica Lazar, and starring Jessica Clark and Rebecca Banatvala, it is a loose, modern-day take on the myth of Apollo and Daphne. Produced by Atticist and Ellie Keel, it won one of The Stage’s Edinburgh Awards last year when it ran in the Paines Plough Roundabout, and now tours to Colchester, Keswick, Canterbury and elsewhere, stopping off at the Soho Theatre for a three-week run throughout April. You can get tickets via the button below.
The Lost Spells - touring, until June 3
Published in 2017, The Lost Words was a giant dictionary of poems and illustrations of the natural world by the writer Robert MacFarlane and the artist Jackie Morris, created in protest against the excision of words relating to the natural world from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. It was a massive hit, and sparked an album of folk music, a sequel – 2020’s The Lost Spells – and now a musical. Produced by Goblin Theatre, it opens at Watford Palace Theatre next week, then tours to London and Keswick. You can read my piece on its creation here, and book tickets via the button below.
The Winston Machine - touring, until April 8
Kandinsky – the devising ensemble comprising James Yeatman, Lauren Mooney and various collaborators – is one of my favourite theatre companies. I liked its 2016 show about psychosomatic illness, Still Ill. I loved its 2018 follow-up about post-war social housing, Trap Street. And I absolutely adored its 2019 show about fossil-hunting, Dinomania. I was very sad to miss Kandinsky’s current show The Winston Machine – about World War II nostalgia – when it premiered at the New Diorama Theatre last January. I’m even sadder that I can’t catch it on its current tour, either. You can go for me. It’s in Bristol tonight and tomorrow, then in Liverpool and Enfield next week. Follow the link below.
Shouts and murmurs
Here are some other bits and bobs that caught my eye this week, and that you might be interested in…
Battersea Arts Centre is a rare jewel of outward-looking, international theatremaking in UK theatre. Natasha Tripney’s The Stage interview with the venue’s head of programming Pelin Başaran is super, and I highly recommend you read it.
The Big Interview in The Stage this week is with the ridiculously prolific Chris Bush - writer of the Olivier Award-nominated Standing At The Sky’s Edge, starring friend of the newsletter Maimuna Memon - and it is by the brilliant Kate Wyver. You can give it a read here.
Two more interviews you might like: Patsy Ferran chatting to Miriam Gillinson in The Guardian, and Ivo Van Hove chatting to Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times.
Lastly, a little shout out to two shows that recently featured in The Crush Bar’s coverage of VAULT Festival: Tatenda Shamiso’s No I.D. is transferring to the Royal Court, and Flawbored’s It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure is off to the Soho Theatre!
Thanks for reading
That is it for this week. If you want to get in touch about anything raised in this issue - or anything at all, really - just reply to this email. Or you can find me on Twitter, where I am @FergusMorgan.
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See you next week.
Fergus