The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes (I’m going to abbreviate this to Shadow) is a theatre work created by Geelong based collective Back to Back Theatre.  It’s currently playing at the Berkeley Street Theatre as part of Canadian Stage’s season.  Back to Back is an unusual company.  Its actors all have perceived intellectual disabilities but, collectively, they have created theatre that has been seen on stages all over the world, on film and on television.

In Shadow, the three actors who wrote the show, playing themselves meet up at a community centre in Geelong to discuss what actions they need to take collectively to address what they perceive as their situation and how they can do that.  It starts as an awkward discussion about who feels comfortable with what, or not; like many such meetings.  What’s slightly weird is that there’s a big surtitle screen which appears to be using (not very good) speech recognition software to create the surtitles.  Ok so the actors have Australian accents and slight speech impediments but they are not difficult to understand.  It feels patronising at first.

But as things progress the role of the screen becomes clearer.  First, channeling Siri, it offers up the usual unhelpful advice.  Then as the conversation becomes more and more about how and why “normals” treat neurodivergent people the screen begins to become the voice of AI.  The conversation turns to questions like if Big Blue can beat Kasparov is AI bound to become superior intellectually to biological humans.  If so, how will it treat us?  How should it, ethically, treat us?  Does AI have ethics?  Is the way AI will treat us foreshadowed by how we (“normals”) treat those with perceived intellectual challenges?  It’s a thought provoking and rather uncomfortable hour or so though not, unsurprisingly, without humour along the way.

The performances are remarkable.  Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price navigate all the potential pitfalls of this kind of engaged theatre without getting at all preachy.  They engage us.  They draw us into their groping for a deeper understanding.  The work has been years in the making and it shows.  The results are impressive.

Shadow continues at Berkeley Street until January 28th.

Photo credits: Kira Kynd