Brighton Fringe 2025
Low Down
“CatGPT is the hilarious and true interactive story of how a Welshman resurrected his cat Lentil 10 years after he died with robotics, custom AI, a synthesiser, minibar, Marshall guitar amp and lots more. It’s unlike anything else on earth and has wowed audiences at Edinburgh Fringe as well as a UK Xmas tour, Tokyo shows and NZ Fringe and Adelaide Fringe. It’s a feel-good show which is mostly comedy with some poignant moments and plenty of science.”
Review
Chris Williams brings CatGPT to Brighton Fringe, a darkly comic, semi-improvised solo show about love, loss, AI, and resurrection. Previously performed in Tokyo, New Zealand, Adelaide and at the Edinburgh Fringe, this multimedia performance tells the mostly true tale of how Williams, with time on his hands during lockdown, attempted to resurrect his beloved cat, Lentil, ten years after its death. Combining robotics, custom AI, a synthesiser, minibar and a Marshall guitar amp, Lentil now returns as a cybernetic feline life coach, offering real-time advice to a live audience through a ChatGPT-infused consciousness. Performed at the Laughing Horse @ The Walrus, the show is part interactive theatre, part philosophical provocation and quirky inquirt, part stand-up, and part horror experiment.
The audience at the Walrus pub were greeted by an unusual sight: a performer standing beside the techy Frankensteinish gubbins of his reanimated pet. Williams’ delivery is confident, warm and offbeat. The improvisation isn’t always crystal clear but the audience paddles along willingly. This is not an ending but a bizarre new beginning, with what’s left of Lentil the cat now occupying a place somewhere between comedy avatar and uncanny oracle. Philosophical questions abound: is this Schrodinger’s Cat live on stage? Can AI simulate mourning? Can it inhabit the afterlife?
The humour oscillates between sharp one-liners and groaning gags, with Lentil riffing stand-up routines generated by machine. Some jokes land. Others do not. The cocaine and cock gags fall flat. There’s curiosity and some tension in the room, but little that feels truly astonishing. ChatGPT is no longer a magical unknown to most audiences and the wow factor of an AI-powered puppet is diminishing. That said, the ethical dilemma is captivating. Should we laugh at this? Should we even be watching?
At its strongest, CatGPT is less a comedy show than an exhibit—an experiment in fringe theatre that flirts with the sacred and the profane. Williams plays honestly with his material and audience. This is dark comedy fuelled by failed taxidermy. It’s risky, weird, and at times profound. But it is also starting to show its age. The reliance on familiar AI tropes and the mechanical structure of audience interaction make the show feel stitched together in places. Friends of the performer feeding in from the sidelines also dull the sense of improvisational spontaneity and undercut genuine audience input.
Still, there’s something compelling here. In its eccentricity, CatGPT asks large questions about death, autonomy, and the role of artificial life. The show could benefit from a director to tighten its form or might just need to go even further into the madness. Williams’ enthusiasm is genuine and infectious, but the concept risks rusting if not evolved. And yet, perhaps that too is part of the point: to sit with discomfort, to prod at taboo, to wrap bones in code, and laugh uneasily into the digital void.
This is not stand-up in any conventional sense. It is an artefact, a provocation, and a risk. And it’s certainly one of the strangest and most original shows at the Fringe.
