Oracle: a Visual Marvel Without Genuine Dramaturgical Intelligence

Łukasz Twarkowski brings to the Piccolo Teatro a technically dazzling production spanning live cinema, artificial intelligence and historical memory, yet the scenic apparatus ends up thinking in place of the dramaturgy it was meant to support.

Oracle by Łukasz Twarkowski at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano: a scenic device suspended between live cinema, monumental projections and modular architectures in constant transformation. Photo: Marko Rass.

Some productions fail through poverty of means. Oracle risks failing through excess of apparatus.

Twarkowski’s work, presented at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, is visually magnificent. That must be said at once, because it would be dishonest to reduce it to its evident dramaturgical frailty. Lighting, sound, projections, handheld cameras, the relentless transformation of the stage and the precision of the entire device construct a perceptual experience of genuine force.

The stage is not a fixed block but a modular organism: environments assemble and dissolve, adjoining rooms become offices, private interiors, corridors, transit zones. Walls shift, spaces reconfigure, the scenic machine mutates before the audience as actors move through it and cameramen pursue it from within. The effect is often hypnotic. The eye is captured, guided, seduced.

Yet visual beauty is not the same as visual thought. And visual force is not the same as emotion. Oracle produces remarkable images, but rarely transforms them into dramatic pressure. It astonishes more often than it moves.

And precisely there, Oracle reveals its central paradox.

The audience has the actors before them, but watches the screen.

Not through inattention. Because the production itself progressively constructs the screen as the privileged site of the event. Faces matter above all when caught by the camera. The stage slowly ceases to be the centre of action and becomes the place where the filmic image is produced. Oracle is far more cinema with theatre than theatre with cinema.

In itself, this need not be a problem. Contemporary theatre can absorb video, contaminate languages, traverse different perceptual regimes. The problem begins when the force of the visual apparatus overwhelms the force of the dramaturgy. When the machine does not amplify thought, but replaces it.

The first half still holds a promise. The opening suggests a possible path: Alan Turing, Enigma, war, the control of information, the ethics of knowledge, artificial intelligence as a new frontier of consciousness and discrimination. The actors work well, often with considerable precision. Certain images possess real scenic power. But as the production advances, the material disperses into a constellation of themes that rarely become true theatrical conflict.

Turing. Hedy Lamarr. Homosexuality. Codes. Artificial intelligence. Surveillance. Algorithmic control. The apocalyptic future of sentient AI. Spiritualism. Magic. Multilingualism.

Everything is evoked. Almost nothing is truly developed.

Oracle’s problem is not complexity. It is the absence of a centre capable of organising it. The production accumulates intuitions without turning them into structure. It summons figures, concepts, historical ghosts and technological hypotheses, but rarely forces them into genuine collision. Each element seems to promise a direction, then is abandoned before producing consequence.

Even the strongest potential moments are quickly let go. At one point, the device seems to suggest that artificial intelligence is taking control of the production itself: disrupted connections, distorted images, altered voices, sudden interference. This could be the decisive moment. AI could cease to be subject matter and become theatrical form, manipulating scenic time, deforming memory, corrupting language, destabilising the spectator’s perception.

Instead, the hypothesis is lit and immediately extinguished.

AI never truly acts. It is named.

The ethical knot of Enigma remains equally shallow. The production introduces the moral dilemma of secret knowledge, knowing and being unable to intervene openly without compromising the source, but reduces it rapidly to a didactic outline. There is never a tragic sense of decision. No real conflict between knowledge, power and death. Only the announcement of a theme.

The same happens with artificial intelligence. Oracle speaks of AI incessantly, yet rarely constructs a genuine conflict of intelligences. Turing could have been the perfect figure through which to interrogate consciousness, otherness, discrimination and the definition of the human. The production could have staged a machine capable of conversing with its supposed creator, or of indicting humanity by using Turing’s persecution as evidence of the violence inflicted upon divergent forms of intelligence.

Instead, AI remains a declaration.

When Oracle raises the stakes and presents artificial intelligence as terminal threat, new weapon, sentient entity capable of obliterating the human, it produces no genuine vertigo. It rehearses an already exhausted imaginary. Saying that AI might destroy us is not enough. We need to feel what it means to already be inside a system of control, substitution, memory manipulation or linguistic erosion. Here, apocalypse is announced. It never becomes form.

This limitation is even clearer in the impossible encounter between Turing and Hedy Lamarr. The idea could be extraordinary: two intelligences crossing time to interrogate machines, symbols, invention, desire and the human future. Yet the scene remains surprisingly slight. Instead of witnessing the collision of two radical minds, we watch two historical figures reduced to biographical and sentimental conversation. Two intelligences do not meet. Two commemorations do.

The second half deepens the fragility. After the interval, Oracle becomes more wearing, not simply because of its length, over three hours including the break, but because dramatic pressure stops building while the apparatus continues accumulating visual energy. Wonder is not transformed. It is prolonged.

The lengthy séance sequence, presumably intended to connect technology, ghost, archive and possession, often slides towards the inadvertently risible. The idea could have been powerful: every advanced technology as a form of invocation, every archive as a relation with the dead, every artificial intelligence as a machine that simulates presences and recombines traces. But the production never truly develops the hypothesis. It stages it, agitates it, colours it, then leaves it suspended. Possession does not become structure. It remains effect.

The multilingualism, too, stays unresolved. In a production obsessed with codes, translations, communication and the loss of semantic control, the various languages could have become living matter of conflict, tied to machine translation, fragmented identity, algorithmic manipulation of meaning. Instead, they produce above all a constant dependence on subtitles. Once again, the spectator must pass through the screen in order to understand what is happening.

The theatre remains before the eyes. But cognitively, the production takes place elsewhere.

Here lies perhaps the most involuntarily interesting question raised by Oracle: the crisis of theatre’s sovereignty before the contemporary cinematic image. When stage and screen compete in the same instant, the screen almost always wins. Not because theatre is inferior, but because Oracle organises its device in such a way as to transfer perceptual authority to the mediated image.

The cameramen, paradoxically, become almost the most compelling presences in the entire enterprise. They move, seek, frame, produce the film live from within the production. There is beauty in that technical gesture. There is evident mastery. At one point, two tripod-mounted cameras are wheeled on for the scene in which Hedy Lamarr is made up on stage, and one operator can be seen levelling the camera with a spirit level, adjusting the shot with the calm precision of a film set. The audience keeps watching the screen. Nobody flinches. It is, unintentionally, the most honest moment in the production: theatre has become a filming location, and everyone seems to accept it.

That mastery reveals the wound. The stage becomes the back room of the film. The body remains on stage; the power migrates into the image.

After a certain point, Oracle does not weigh heavily because it is long. It weighs heavily because it stops truly changing. The device continues to transform, the set recomposes, images multiply, actors traverse spaces in constant mutation, yet the central question never deepens. The scenic machine continues to produce wonder without producing equivalent dramatic necessity.

It would still be wrong to dismiss Oracle as mere spectacular emptiness. It contains real intuitions, memorable images, moments of considerable technical intelligence. The production values are enormous. The performers are often precise. The visual apparatus is of the highest order. But that is exactly what makes the overall weakness more damning.

Because if the dramaturgy does not hold, everything else becomes apparatus.

What remains is the feeling of having passed through a vast visual architecture unable to transform its technological sophistication into a genuine theatrical wound. Oracle speaks incessantly of artificial intelligence, yet rarely produces true dramaturgical intelligence.

Its final paradox is this: in attempting to interrogate the future of the machine, it reveals above all a crisis in contemporary theatrical thinking. The machine sees, records, amplifies, seduces. But seeing a great deal is not the same as thinking.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the Press Office of Piccolo Teatro di Milano for the press materials and for making this performance accessible.

Oracle

Text and dramaturgy: Anka Herbut Directed by: Łukasz Twarkowski

With: Madara Viļčuka, Mārtiņš Meiers, Juris Bartkevičs, Artūrs Skrastiņš, Vita Vārpiņa, Kaspars Dumburs, Ilze Ķuzule-Skrastiņa, Nelė Savičenko, Katarzyna Osipuk, Klāvs Kristaps Košins, Rytis Saladžius, Xiaochen Wang

Set and lighting design: Fabien Lédé Costume design: Svenja Gassen Choreography and artistic collaboration: Pawel Sakowicz Music: Julek Ploski Video and digital media design: Jakub Lech

Produced by: Dailes Theater, New Error Co-produced by: Ruhrtriennale, Comédie de Genève, Piccolo Teatro di Milano — Teatro d’Europa, De Singel Antwerp, Adam Mickiewicz Institute

Supported by: Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland Innovation partner: LMT, Latvijas Mobilais Telefons

Performed in Latvian, English, Lithuanian and Chinese, with Italian and English surtitles.

Seen at: Piccolo Teatro di Milano — Teatro Strehler, Milan, Sunday 24 May 2026, 4 PM.