The Uncontainable Nausea of Alec Baldwin review – slapdash absurdism

A man bearing the same name as the actor wants to apologise to a woman for something he has ‘accidentally’ done in this patience-testing undisciplined drama

‘The following scenes are AI generated,” the projected text declares. Revealing the flattening, slopifying effect of AI, this delegation of the script might come across as audacious and intrepid – making a point about our over-reliance on AI and the doom it spells for society – if only the human-written chunks of this patience-testing play were any stronger.

From experimental company TG Works, The Uncontainable Nausea of Alec Baldwin is an absurdist trudge around ideas of violence, distraction and apathy in the age of the internet. But where they aim for existentialism, they land with a slump at the foot of randomness.

Written and directed by Tommaso Giacomin, this undisciplined drama gives us Alec Baldwin (a committed James Aldred), a man who inconsequentially shares a name with the volatile actor whose on-set error killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins in 2021. Our Alec is also in a position of wanting to apologise for something he has “accidentally” done to a woman. But as he is unwilling to explain his actions, we must endure long, deliberately evasive scenes of listless clowning and earnest dance breaks until the tepid payoff can play out. With lack of clarity about the rules of their illogical world, and ever-diminishing tension, there is little to pull our focus through to the end.

Much like AI, the majority of this slapdash surreal show is an act of persistent pick pocketing, with swathes of the play’s content nabbed from the internet and an infuriating lack of scrutiny along the way. Rather than conjuring the impression of doomscrolling and its resulting numbness, the energetic cast of five simply give us the real thing: scrolling through YouTube clips, reading out news through live feeds in overlapping waves, and describing in detail pictures of murdered Palestinian children. Any emotion is cheaply won. The result is like slapping down a pile of newspapers, pointing at a phone, saying: “It’s bad, huh?” and taking a bow.

• At New Diorama theatre, London, until 24 March