Dead Poets Live
If This Be Magic
London
Shakespeare and AI
Dead Poets Live returned to the Coronet Theatre with Tamsin Greig and Rory Kinnear to celebrate the life and work of William Shakespeare.
Things change gradually, then suddenly. Last year, it might have seemed an interesting thought-experiment to consider what implications Large Language Model AIs might have for human creativity. That’s no longer a hypothetical question. What would it mean if an AGI could write poetry to rival that of Shakespeare: the universal, timeless poet; the poet, above all, of the human? Is that feasible? And if so, would that diminish, or enhance, the meaning of Shakespeare, whose work we use as a sort of map of what being human is?
Sunday’s Dead Poets Live show at The Coronet Theatre was a conversation between two actors acclaimed for their Shakespeare work, Rory Kinnear and Tamsin Greig, set in a garden in London and taking place today. It covers Shakespeare’s ‘invention of the human’, his fascination with automata – things that only appear conscious – his alertness to moments of radical social upheaval and his profound understanding of the limits of language as a tool for human expression.
Our title – If This Be Magic – comes from The Winter’s Tale, Act V, Sc. 3, as Leontes sees what he thinks is the statue of his dead wife begin to move and refers to a suggestion that this apparent miracle must be ‘assisted by wicked pow’rs’. ‘If this be magic,’ says the astonished Leontes, ‘let it be an art / Lawful as eating.’ Let us hope so, too.
Performers
Rory Kinnear is an actor who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and has recently enjoyed success in recent films such as Bank of Dave, Men and Peterloo, further to roles in Skyfall and Broken, for which he won Best Supporting Actor at the British Independent Film Awards. In 2010 Rory played Angelo in Measure For Measure at the Almeida Theatre and later went on to play Hamlet at the National Theatre. The two roles won him the best actor award in the Evening Standard drama awards. He also achieved recognition as the outrageous Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode at the National Theatre, winning a Laurence Olivier Award and Ian Charleson Award. Other notable theatre work includes the parts of Iago, for which he was also received the Evening Stand Best Actor award, and Macbeth, the lead in Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, Gorky’s Philistines and the role of Mitia in a stage adaptation of the Nikita Mikhalkov film Burnt by the Sun, all for the National Theatre.
Rory has also appeared in numerous television dramas including Loving Miss Hatto, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Black Mirror: National Anthem, Richard II, Cranford, Years And Years and, most recently, Ridley Road. The Herd, Rory’s debut play, premiered at the Bush Theatre in 2013 and transferred to Steppenwolf Theatre in the USA in 2015.
© Dominika Baerova