AI can help theatre-makers research, brainstorm scripts and sketch set designs, but playwright and director Serkan Fırtına argues that it cannot replace the live, unpredictable encounter between actors and audience. His essay puts a useful boundary around the technology: a capable assistant backstage is not the same thing as a performer on stage.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
In a new essay for PopMatters, Fırtına draws on his work as artistic director of Efeler City Theatre in Aydın, Turkey. He describes AI as a potential pre-production and administration tool, including for exploring dialogue, researching character backgrounds, developing visual concepts and analysing audience data.
His central argument is that live performance depends on things such as an actor responding to a room, local community experience and moments that do not go to plan. Fırtına recounts an actor with disabilities missing a cue and receiving a spontaneous wave of applause from the audience. That moment, he argues, illustrates what cannot be reduced to producing a polished script or simulated scene. Read Fırtına’s essay in PopMatters.
Why it matters
This is a perspective on AI adoption that is more practical than the usual contest over whether machines can make art. Fırtına identifies specific work where generative tools may help theatre teams, while arguing that the shared, physical performance remains a human activity.
It is an argument from a theatre practitioner, not evidence that AI tools reliably improve productions or that audiences always prefer live work. But it gives arts organisations a sharper question than “use AI or don’t”: where can it save time without flattening the local knowledge and human interaction the work depends on?
Our read
The useful distinction is between helping prepare a performance and pretending to be the performance. Fırtına’s examples make the first case concrete, while his essay’s strongest point is that live theatre can draw meaning from uncertainty rather than scrub it out. AI may earn a place in the rehearsal room; it has not earned the starring role simply by producing fluent text.
What to watch
- Whether theatre organisations adopt AI for research, administration or early-stage creative work.
- How artists set boundaries around AI-generated scripts, designs and audience data.
- Whether audiences and practitioners find these tools useful without losing the local character of a production.
Discussion spark: Should theatre companies use generative AI for creative work such as dialogue and design, or keep it to research and administration?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (27 October 2026, 14:49 UTC)
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