Machine They're Secretly Building, A

From what might be a news desk, an office, a bedroom, a bunker under a mountain or a theatre, two people speak up, speak out, blow the whistle and lift the veil on the insidious machine of surveillance. Read more …

A Machine they’re Secretly Building charts a course from the Top Secret secrets of WWI intelligence (via the moon, 1972’s Chess World Championships, a disco in Oklahoma and the cafeteria at CERN) through to 9/11, the erosion of privacy, Edward Snowden and the terror of a future that might already be upon us.

The critical consensus

In what at times resembles a dramatised TED talk, this barrage of facts and figures might well be dismissed as the stuff of paranoid science-fiction conspiracy theories. As the evidence stacks up, however, the truth of Baynton and Lee's high-tech show-and-tell is very clearly out there.

(*) (*) Neil Cooper, Coffee-Table Notes, 14/04/2017

A Machine… is an alarm clock, waking us up. Leaving the theatre, you might think twice about turning your mobile back on straight away.

(*) Matthew Keeley, The Wee Review, 15/04/2017

All this is slickly done, but however important the message, it lacks the revelatory power of something we didn’t know already. Instead of being galvanised into action, we leave with only a half resolve to switch to private browsing more often.

(*) (*) Mark Fisher, The Scotsman, 18/04/2017

Chilling, intelligent and witty theatre from Proto-type looks at the effects of data-gathering on our free speech.

(*) Lorna Irvine, The List, 19/04/2017

(*) Marine Furet, Plays to See, 18/04/2017