Anthropology review – clever AI missing-person mystery

While screenwriters strike, partly over the threat from artificial intelligence, playwrights are busy writing about AI. Lauren Gunderson's Anthropology is the second world premiere in a week featuring pseudo-humanity – after Alan Ayckbourn's Constant Companions – and the third such London play in six months, following Jordan Harrison's Marjorie Prime and Andrew Stein's Disruption. Gunderson, an American whose I and You was a 2018 Hampstead success, creates Merril, a software engineer, whose sister Angie has been missing for a year after failing to reach home one night. From the phone, laptop and online footprint the young woman left behind, Merril sculpts a virtual Angie. The early scenes are a Merril duologue with a disembodied voice, like a digital Krapp's Last Tape, but Gunderson and director Anna Ledwich sensibly open up this closed circuit so that we see three, or by some counts four, others.