3 AI-themed theater shows explore humanity’s digital future at Scottish festival

Edinburgh’s fringe festival is featuring three AI-themed theatrical productions that explore humanity’s complex relationship with artificial intelligence through immersive storytelling and cutting-edge technology. These performances—Dead Air, Stampin’ in the Graveyard, and AI: The Waiting Room—use AI as both subject matter and creative tool, reflecting broader cultural anxieties about our technological future.

What you should know: Each production takes a different approach to examining AI’s impact on human experience and emotional processing.

• Dead Air reimagines Hamlet with protagonist Alfie using an AI service called AiR to communicate with her deceased father, exploring themes of grief and digital dependency.
• Stampin’ in the Graveyard features an AI chatbot named Rose guiding audiences through interactive apocalyptic scenarios via headphones and glitchy interfaces.
• AI: The Waiting Room creates personalized stories for each audience member using AI-generated scripts based on pre-show questionnaires about their lives and relationships.

How it works: The productions employ various technological approaches to blur the boundaries between human and artificial intelligence.

• Dead Air’s AiR service offers “temperature controls” that allow users to adjust their AI companion from mechanical to fanciful, highlighting the uncanny valley effect of digital resurrection.
• Stampin’ in the Graveyard uses audience polling to navigate different storylines, with rose graphics flashing when the AI chatbot begins “hallucinating,” accompanied by a steampunk synth-accordion made from recycled electronics.
• AI: The Waiting Room generates unique narrative elements for each spectator while weaving them into a larger shared story about societal breakdown, requiring audience members to move freely around the studio space.

The big picture: These performances reflect deeper cultural uncertainties about AI’s role in human society and emotional life.

• All three productions adopt an apocalyptic mood, questioning whether humans have a meaningful future or are “bequeathing it to the machines.”
• The shows explore how AI confuses boundaries between real and imagined experiences, similar to how earlier technologies like radio and television unsettled previous generations.
• Each production grapples with AI’s ability to communicate like humans while lacking physical presence, creating what Guardian reviewer Mark Fisher describes as “magical” yet “magically wrong” interactions.

What critics are saying: Guardian reviewer Mark Fisher notes the productions’ shared focus on technological anxiety and human displacement.

• “Every new technology unsettles us because it confuses our boundaries,” Fisher observes, comparing AI’s impact to how “the first printed books must have done to an illiterate population, unschooled in mystical Latin.”
• He describes AI: The Waiting Room as “a quirkily intriguing attempt to be humanly creative with this inhuman technology,” despite some forced audience participation elements.
• Fisher characterizes the overall fringe AI theme as exploring whether artificial intelligence represents “a comforting replacement or a cynical means of data mining.”

Performance details: The three productions run through late August at different Edinburgh venues.

• Dead Air continues at Pleasance Courtyard until August 24.
• Stampin’ in the Graveyard runs at Summerhall until August 25.
• AI: The Waiting Room performs at Studio at C Arts until August 16.