Behind The Diviners: People Show on AI, Physical Theatre & Emotion

“Apparently audiences don’t find it dark and depressing. A lot of them say it’s a love letter to the human race.”

That’s how Fiona Creese describes The Diviners, the latest piece from legendary theatre collective People Show. Now touring across the UK, the show blends the strange poetics of physical theatre with a jittery digital heart, placing four malfunctioning AIs in a colour-coded trap of movement, music and malfunction. It’s the 145th show by the company – and another push into the unknown.

People Show returns with a surreal new story of AI and apocalypse

Theatre company People Show has been confounding expectations and experimenting with performance since 1966. With a process rooted in live discovery, improvisation, and collective design, the company has built a legacy of boundary-pushing work across 145 shows – and counting. Their latest, The Diviners, returns to UK stages this spring after a successful 2024 tour, continuing its strange and tender exploration of technology, memory, and the ghosts of the future.

Originally developed in a pub theatre and now touring to venues including The Albany (Coventry), Lanternhouse (Cumbernauld), Byre Theatre (St Andrews), and the Georgian Theatre Royal at Swaledale Festival, the show unfolds inside a cuboid trap inhabited by four malfunctioning artificial intelligences. Painted floor grids stand in for server space. Blankets become both costume and command line. Projected symbols pulse and fade. It’s theatre as corrupted data stream: glitchy, unstable, and surprisingly emotional.

“Apparently audiences don’t find it dark and depressing. A lot of them say it’s a love letter to the human race.”

Building AI on a budget: improvisation as design

“We never mention the word AI throughout the whole show,” says Gareth Brierley, one of the core performers and devisers. “They think they are human, but what they think is being human is completely wrong. It’s like the signal coming into the servers is disrupted, so they’re only getting bits of information and mixing stuff up about what’s real and what isn’t.”

The visual world of The Diviners was born from this idea of digital confusion and creative limits. “We originally wanted a disco floor,” Brierley adds. “We realised that was too expensive, so we came up with this painted floor idea.”

Each performer is colour-coded – cyan, magenta, yellow, black – a nod to CMYK printing. This wasn’t just a stylistic choice, but one rooted in the team’s interdisciplinary practice.

“As a graphic designer, I was trying to find a visual language,” explains Sadie Cook. “In print and graphics, everything is submitted in CMYK… and because there were four of us working together, it made sense. You can create millions and millions of different colours and outcomes from those four.”

These colour identities also tie into how the characters are powered down – or rebooted. “We needed a way to close them down,” says Creese. “We thought about what you would do with a parrot. You throw a cloth over it. So we started doing this improvisation throwing coats over each other’s heads. We realised this is a really useful tool to have in a visual physical theatre piece.”

**Production shots provided by People Show**

Creating something from nothing: People Show’s signature process

True to People Show’s process, none of this was written in advance. “Every show is an exciting, unexpected challenge because we start from nothing,” says Brierley. “With this show all we had was a venue and date. The exciting thing is the discoveries. Every day is a discovery.”

The show’s themes tap into big cultural questions – apocalypse, artificial intelligence, technological anxiety – but it does so with an odd humour and theatrical playfulness. The team even tried to involve AI directly in the writing process.

“At the beginning of our AI inquiries we actually asked ChatGPT to write our show,” Cook admits.

“It was quite new at this point,” adds Creese. “Then we watched a film written by AI, based on the book Heidi. It was surreal and awful in a lot of ways.”

Compared to the disjointed logic of AI-generated media, The Diviners feels like a cautionary tale, but not a pessimistic one.

“We’re not anti-AI,” says Creese. “It’s just a cautionary tale. AI is fantastic for so many things… but it can’t replace certain things.”

“We’re not trying to insult the whole idea of AI,” she continues. “Apparently audiences don’t find it dark and depressing. A lot of them say it’s a love letter to the human race.”

Brierley agrees. “It’s about understanding what it means to be human through the lens of something that doesn’t quite get it,” he says. “There’s something both hilarious and quite profound in that.”

“We thought about what you would do with a parrot. You throw a cloth over it. So we started doing this improvisation throwing coats over each other’s heads.”

Music, movement and malfunction: the emotional engine of the show

That emotional pull is strongest in the show’s music, which is performed live by long-time People Show collaborator George Khan – virtually.

“Every time we perform this show I appreciate as if, for the first time, the beauty of certain pieces of music,” says Cook.

“The score is very emotive,” adds Creese. “At the beginning I thought AI is never going to be able to feel a piece of music. No way it can feel things like we do. George’s flute playing hits the spot each time.”

For Brierley, one moment in particular stands out: “There’s a point where Fiona does a movement section that’s really moving to this lovely bit of cello. It’s very beautiful movement that becomes quite a violent act.”

Creese also notes how music and motion combine in ways that surprise them too. “Sometimes in the quieter parts, you can hear the breaths of the audience,” she says. “That’s when I know something’s really landing.”

Adding a layer of unpredictability to each performance is the nightly inclusion of a secret guest artist from the People Show extended family.

“We had the idea of the guest artist quite early on,” says Brierley. “What’s interesting is that everyone has a different way or interpretation of it. That is always really exciting.”

You don’t need to know People Show to feel it

Despite the company’s long history, The Diviners stands alone.

“I don’t think anyone needs to have seen any previous shows by People Show to experience this piece,” says Cook. “You could walk into this piece, not having ever been to a theatre before, and you’ll get something from it.”

Asked what keeps them looking for the next idea, Creese says, “When we make another new show, we will be exploring something different, stories that maybe haven’t been told yet. That’s our thing. But we are also now making films… This way we can send our work and our stories and our magical realism across the world, across the Universe!”