Doomers at the Rose Lipman Building – Theatre That Confronts Ourselves & Our Times – Review

Last Updated on September 24, 2025

A loose, fly-on-the-wall drama about Silicon Valley hopefuls turned sour by moral crises

Before the first line of dialogue, the audience of DOOMERS is ordered over the Tannoy to “sit the **** down”. From this moment, the two-act play inducts us into an insult-saturated world of tech-rich Gen-Zers facing a company crisis.

The masterminds behind an artificial intelligence product – ‘Mindmesh’ – are on war footing. The first act finds company creator Seth, an unhinged sociopath, played powerfully by Sam Hykrin (F***boy), hunkered down in a San Francisco apartment. Alarming ‘bugs’ in his AI model have prompted his sacking by the executive board – a controversy about which the drama turns.

The play is dialogue-heavy and essentially plotless. The first act follows Seth and his advisors as they grapple with the fallout of his dismissal and the ethical crunch points of their project. After the interval, the cast changes completely. The second half follows the board members’ fretting over the direction of the company, their associations with Seth and the future of super intelligence.

At stake are the characters’ careers – but, more existentially, the fate of human civilisation. Gasda’s script makes the most of this ‘high philosophical’ framing. Dialogue is scattered with memorable, if slightly clichéd, one-liners: “adapt or die”; “I was fired for creating miracles”; “it’s capitalism … just, like, enjoy it”. The drama comes from ethical mind games converted into pithy speech, well-paced vindicative exchanges and free-wheeling substance use, lines spat through gulps of wine.

The play is strong in its depiction of an industry that rewards loud impositions of masculine ego. Hyrkin as Seth and James Holmes (Miranda) as Richard – an older nihilistic board member – sensitively inhabit characters pushed to moral and emotional extremes by their brilliant minds and cut-throat capitalism. These standout performances kept the drama taught in a production that threatened to lose itself in the dense ethical puzzles that were its conceptual foundations.

There were points that remained unresolved. What, exactly, went wrong with the AI system? Who, exactly, is Ivan, a controversial peripheral figure known only by name? And what does Seth’s bombshell tweet, posted online halfway through the first act, actually say? These loose ends felt deliberate – but did more to confuse the chess-game-like action than excite it.

The play was at its best when its philosophical baggage gave way to tender moments of human vulnerability. Alina, the safety expert, played thoughtfully by Neetika Knight (1984), psychoanalyses Seth aloud. He is, apparently, a terrified child, his attachment to AI progress merely a self-destructive reflex. Or when Yui Minari (Richard II) as Mei, the youngest board member, recalls the death of her brother in a car accident, reflecting on life’s fragility. Zsuzsa Magyar’s direction allows these intimate flashes to push aside the messy tech world. In the end, the human traumas are as familiar as the discarded takeaway boxes strewed across the set.

The most powerful episode came at the end of the first act when Seth asks their AI chatbot for advice. There’s palpable jeopardy in the silence as a response loads. The direction of the play is suddenly ceded to a robot, telling the stunned cast to murder a rival. The drama felt genuinely threatened by this ‘live’ consultation of AI. In this, Gasda’s writing intelligently stretches the dramatic possibilities for staging robot intelligence.

DOOMERS is about the “biblical” power of bubble-tea-drinking twenty-somethings to define technological progress. It felt like watching a puzzle assemble itself – the characters became ill-fitting pieces forced together or discarded by each other all at once. It’s high-octane theatre tackling the grandest social themes. It leaves you fearful of what there is to lose and desperate for measured heads.

Doomers at the Rose Lipman Building runs until 3rd October.

Rose Lipman Building

De Beauvoir Rd,
London
N1 5SE

Photographer: Etienne Bolger

Looking for something different? Check our review of The Weir at the Harold Pinter Theatre