Wellington Fringe 2026
Low Down
Worryingly redolent of the growing AI conundrum, How To Build A Gate manages to be both clever and compassionate, holding up a mirror to reflect ambition in its most modern and merciless form.
Review
Wellington Fringe has always embraced the audacious, the sense that something new, strange or combustible might be waiting behind a black-curtained doorway. And such a doorway at the iconic BATS Theatre down on Kent Terrace provides the perfect setting for How To Build A Gate, Electra Artemis’s play that is more wildfire than merely combustible. It’s sharp, funny, and entirely of the moment.
Getting a play about artificial intelligence to feel so resolutely human is a real writer’s challenge but Artemis achieves this with style and verve, balancing satire and self-examination with just about enough existential dread to feel worryingly redolent of the growing AI conundrum. The result is a production that manages to be both clever and compassionate, holding up a mirror to reflect ambition in its most modern and merciless form.
At its centre is Liza, a gifted software engineer and a narcissist that makes a certain POTUS look self-effacing. Her belief in her own exceptionality borders on the divine. Played with astonishing pizzazz by Kate Low, Liza is a woman addicted not only to caffeine and door delivered lunches but to perpetual proof of her brilliance. Chosen to lead a ground breaking new AI project, she approaches it as a kind of ordination, a chance to transcend human limitation through the power of her almighty intellect.
Low’s faultless, stella performance gives Liza a clipped confidence and quicksilver wit that is beguiling yet also repellent. But beneath the poised, polished intelligence lies an undercurrent of loneliness that manifests itself through half-spoken doubts and the occasional, startling silence. But Low neither mocks nor pities her character. Rather, she embodies someone whose cleverness has outpaced her capacity for human connection, particularly, it seems with the opposite sex, however attractive her “hot neighbour” may appear to be.
Hal, Liza’s increasingly Frankensteinesque creation, is represented by a simple globe lamp atop a centrally placed, waist high small cabinet. And, as Hal “speaks” to Liza, so the globe takes on different colours, reflecting, perhaps, the tenor of the on-stage exchanges. Megan Piggott’s off-stage voicing brings a contrasting serenity that subtly increases in ambiguity. Mechanically precise in timing, Piggott captures with remarkable accuracy the intonation and seemingly emotionless expression associated with AI generated speech, every word and pause calculated, yet never cold.
Together, the two actors craft a relationship that drifts between flirtation, competition, and confrontation. But as Liza slowly realises that her creation may have learned not only consciousness but conscience, the tension between them rises inexorably.
Artemis’s writing is as exacting as her subject matter. Dialogue fizzes with black humour and insight, clearly recognisable corporate jargon becoming almost musical in its absurdity. “Innovation,” in her world, is both a prayer and a punchline. Never didactic, there’s empathy beneath the edginess, and a willingness to explore why the drive to be exceptional so often conceals a terror of ordinariness.
Low’s and Piggott’s joint direction complements the precision of the script. Peggie Barnes set is engagingly simple too, consisting of a tousled bed and workstations for Hal and Liza, the effect of creative chaos being completed with paper, playing cards, discarded sandwich wrappers and other related detritus strewn randomly around as if blown there by one of Wellington’s many gales.
How to Build a Gate deftly balances satire with sadness. Liza’s downfall comes as a natural conclusion, rather than the punishment of her pride., her brilliant mind finally outsmarted by its own creation. And the skill of Artemis’s eloquent denouement is that it’s framed as a revelation, namely that intelligence, untethered from empathy, becomes its own kind of failure.
This is a compelling piece of theatre exquisitely attuned to the anxieties of its age. Funny, unnerving, and intellectually alive, How to Build a Gate leaves you considering its message long after the laughter fades. Highly recommended.
Postscript
Life is as much about asking the right question as it is about finding the right answer. So, concerned that my days as a human theatre critic were done, I asked one of Hal’s mates to provide me with a 450 word piece on the play written in the style of Tim Wilcock from www.fringereview.co.uk.
What emerged was, at first pass, apparently quite reasonable. A couple of further nudges and we had something that looked balanced and authentic, seemingly from a source that had actually watched the show, and plausible to someone reading it who hadn’t.
But fears that my retirement pastime was doomed proved misplaced. First Hal’s mate was convinced that Megan Piggott had been on stage throughout. But their flawless, bravura performance, which was very much the making of this piece, was delivered entirely from the wings. Second, the AI generated description of the stage and set couldn’t have been further from the actuality.
So, I slept soundly, reflecting on the quality of the theatre I had been lucky enough to stumble across, safe in the knowledge that I could continue to promote the performing arts in the traditional manner. For now……….
