What’s the worst thing you could find out about your mum in her will? For Carrie (Sali Adams), the protagonist of Interrobang Productions’ My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend, there’s one standout discovery: Aled. Brilliantly voiced by Billy Morton, Aled is a chatbot, but also, more concerningly, Carrie’s mum’s AI boyfriend. Adams’ laugh-out-loud original play (directed by Aman Arya) follows Carrie, a Welsh secondary school teacher based in Guildford, processing the death of her mum whilst on a trip to scatter her ashes in Anglesey.
There are some seriously funny moments throughout this play. During her Welsh pilgrimage, Carrie listens to a radio host (Jonathan Tanner) play a fantastic satirical show dedicated to Take That. Aled eulogises Carrie’s mum but ends his speech with “Was that too effusive?”, adding a hilarious stab of bathos. In a deliciously awkward encounter, Carrie makes her mum’s ashes ‘talk’ to a stranger by playing with the lid of the urn. Clippy, the Microsoft Office virtual assistant, also gets a mention, a move which earns Adams significant respect in my book.
While topical and often laugh-out-loud funny, My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend is also heartfelt and tender. In one particularly tear-jerking scene, Carrie, paying homage to her Welsh mum, watches the Six Nations on TV and sings along to the few words she knows of the Welsh national anthem. Adams depicts beautifully how it feels to move away from your spiritual home – that intoxicating mixture of guilt and nostalgia, manifesting in unexpected moments like watching rugby.
Costumed in a frumpy blouse and cardigan, Carrie is evidently disappointed about her lot in life: a mere classroom teacher, nothing compared to her big-city mum. When the audience meets her, Carrie’s biggest character flaw is being too cold, a trait which Aled seems to heal. Adams is making a clear commentary on communication: Aled, a robot, offers non-judgemental warmth and kindness, whilst Carrie struggles to open up to the people she loves. In many ways, this worked well, but I was left wondering how much more cohesive these plot points might have been if Adams had the courage to lean into Carrie’s unlikeable traits.
The play was at its best during the service station interlude. Carrie, on her way to Wales to scatter her mum’s ashes with Aled, makes a stop to buy a pasty in a service station. Whilst she’s in the bathroom (offstage), the audience listens to Carrie on the phone to her cat-minder, in a touching moment. The dialogue between Carrie and Amber (Avani Rao) was surprisingly engaging given Amber’s lines were pre-recorded.
Carrie’s dialogue with Father Thomas (Adam Griffiths), a priest in her hometown Anglesey, was sweet and painful in equal measures, showing how one’s home-town is so easily rendered a ghost-town. In a quintessentially irreverent moment, this heart-wrenching nostalgia becomes the set-up for the best joke in the show.
Yet there is one thing I’d recommend to student writers: don’t use cut essay material in your play. One scene was devoted to an internal debate with philosopher John Locke (Hannah Wei) about what constitutes a person. I found this scene a little pretentious, dull, and tonally off kilter with the rest of the show, even if the opening night audience laughed knowingly – perhaps they know something about John Locke that I don’t. Nonetheless the dialogue appeared absurd in the mouth of a secondary school teacher, for whom tutorials are a hazy memory.
Aside from minor errors on the night, Iona Blair’s sound design was immersive and effectively cosy. When combined with Libby Alldread’s lighting design, the set really came together during the intimate Six Nations TV scene. Whilst some props in the show were necessary and effective (the Bluetooth speaker representing Aled, the urn, the pasty), I do wish the production had dispatched with the unwieldy, awkward boxes Adams was constantly reconfiguring (to make a car, a bed, a pair of seats).
Adams does her punchline premise justice. Alongside the dark comedy sits Adams’ pertinent musings on grief and reconnecting with loved ones, even posthumously; the play starts with Carrie scrolling aimlessly on her phone, and ends with her making a call. My Dead Mum’s AI Boyfriend leaves the audience wondering whether it really is technology to blame for our lack of connection.
