Sydney Reviews

Left – Simon Maiden and Natasha Jacobs. Cover – Simon Maiden

Robots vs Art is just as much fun as the title suggests. Like all good comedy, it is underpinned by serious questions – in this case, about the role of art and the nature of humanity – and leaves you thinking as well as laughing. But it mostly leaves you laughing. This is a very, very funny play.

The show is set in a dystopian (or is utopian?) future where most of humanity has been wiped out by humanoid robots. Those who are left are forced to work in mines, and the minerals that they obtain are used to run the robots’ wholly sustainable and environmentally friendly world. If the humans do not cooperate, the robots beat them with chains. One such human is Giles (Daniel Frederiksen), who is surprised and terrified to be summoned before Master Executive Bot (Simon Maiden). Master Executive Bot needs Giles’ help. The last frontier the robots have yet to conquer is art (they use humanity’s greatest artistic monuments as prosaic storehouses for recharging), and Master Executive Bot has written a play. He has discovered that before the robots took over, Giles used to be a writer/director. Now, Master Executive Bot wants Giles to direct his play.

The “vs” in the title of Robots vs Art is very important. The show makes much of how deeply antithetical art is to a society incapable of feeling. Some of the best gags in the show are the cheapest plays on this point: for example, Claw Bot (Paul David Goddard) is so little suited to being an actor that he literally cannot pick up a pencil to write down his notes, and it is hysterical. But it is also on this point – the opposition of robots and art – that the show is most meditative. Art is valorised as the final frontier which the robots cannot overcome, then eulogised when the robots do manage to put on their play, but ultimately (or Inuitly) remains something ephemeral, something out of reach. It is not so much art that the robots cannot master, but multiplicity. They are programmed for perfection: they cannot adequately grasp the infinite imperfection that art requires. Our hero Giles knows this, and we could argue that this makes him arrogant about his own capacity for feeling: a petty emotion just as human as love or anger or jealousy. Art overpowers him just as surely as it overpowers the robots.

This show is perfectly cast. Daniel Frederiksen is equal parts downtrodden, idealistic, and opportunistic as Giles. Simon Maiden as Master Executive Bot manages to be both sinister and naive – his explosion when he finally does find himself capable of emotion is spectacularly hilarious. Natasha Jacobs plays Gib the fembot as a sort of cyborg manic pixie dream girl, which pays off wonderfully in the play’s final scene. But for me, the show belongs to Paul David Goddard as Soldier Bot and especially as Claw Bot. He is blessed with some fantastic one liners (I think I’ll be laughing over “wanker detected” for quite some time), and he makes the most of them. His completely po-faced well-meaning geniality as Claw Bot is so perfect.

I loved this show. The only issue I had with it is that in the very beginning the actors were delivering their lines so quickly it was occasionally difficult to hear what they were saying, but this swiftly resolved itself. This show will make you think about whether art is humanity’s greatest achievement or its ultimate downfall (or both), and it will probably make you a bit wary of chains for the next little while, but more than anything, it will make you laugh. This is eighty minutes of the funniest theatre I have ever seen.


Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company presents
Robots vs Art
by Travis Cotton

Director Travis Cotton

Venue: Bondi Pavilion Theatre
Dates: 21 June – July 7
Times: Tues – Sat 8pm (Please note that Sat 22 June is a 3.00pm matinee)
Tickets: $35 – $21
Bookings: rocksurfers.org/robots/