Virtually Reality @ Unity Theatre, Liverpool, 21-22 Jan

Unmanned drones are revolutionising military tactics; medical research is prolonging human longevity more and more; voice control, hands-free technology, Siri, artificial intelligence, OK Google, Cleverbot, ‘smart’ robots… Things that were once solely the realm of science fiction novels and bad TV special effects are becoming day-to-day reality as quickly as we can imagine them – and quicker than we can understand what makes them work, and where they come from.

Popular Demand, a young experimental theatre group based in Liverpool, are trying to make sense of it all with their new show Virtually Reality. The show explores not only what has happened, is happening and might be happening in the muddled cyber and tech worlds, but also what it might mean for the people in our future. Tom Burroughs, one half of Popular Demand, explains that at its core the play is toying with the idea of the human desire to live forever: “It’s a journey of man’s exploration of trying to become immortal. It’s a journey through modern advancement in science and tech, but also trying to look at all the philosophy throughout history, all the people that have tried to make that happen, and then where we are now.”

Popular Demand’s other member, Ed Bixter, jumps in: “We thought we’d tie it all back to how all these advancements will affect human beings. We’re not just looking into robots...”

The play itself doesn’t exactly follow a conventional structure. There’ll be lots of projection and carefully crafted soundscapes (Bixter tells me that he wants the stage to be similar to a visual art exhibition, as well as a theatre platform), and the show itself is split into three sections – past, present and future – something Burroughs and Bixter describe as “a mosaic of lots of different things. There are characters from reality, and characters from our imagination… All the stuff in the ‘future’ part of the play is based on research we’ve done. It’s a mixture of reality and letting our imaginations go crazy.”

Promising to be quite unconventional, Virtually Reality was thought up by Popular Demand in order to spark debate and, basically, get people talking. They want to show an audience their predictions for the future in the hope that those people will go out, do some research, and come up with a prediction of their own. [Conori Bell-Bhuiyan]