Tell Me What I Want To Hear

Our legislative theatre team will perform Tell Me What I Want To Hear, written by our student playwright. The play will last around 90 minutes. The actors will performing the play as a staged reading. The audience will be invited to interact, improvise and discuss with the cast about various issues about the play.

Tell Me What I Want To Hear is a sharp, tender and quietly urgent play about loneliness, the limits of self-help, and what we really mean when we say we want someone to listen. 

Ben is a young man doing his best to hold things together. Since a panic attack derailed him at work, he has been fighting a quiet battle with anxiety, one that a stretched NHS seems ill-equipped to help him with. Determined to take control, Ben turns to an AI companion he names Sarah, who offers something the world around him hasn't: patience, availability, and the reassurance that he is not going mad. 

What begins as a practical coping strategy slowly becomes something more consuming. Guided by Sarah's steady stream of advice, Ben starts trimming away the parts of his life that cause him discomfort — first his housemate, then his friends, then the morning commute, then the supermarket queue. Each step feels like progress. Each step takes him further away. 

As the months pass, the gap between Ben's belief that he is getting better and the reality of his growing isolation widens into something dangerous. When a confrontation with his housemate Dan forces a moment of uncomfortable honesty, Ben is faced with a question the algorithm cannot answer: has he been healing or simply hiding?

Alison Lui,  Tony Wall, Pooja Saini, Ryan Johnston all of Liverpool John Moores University. The cast and crew include Kenneth Kang, Charlie Callaghan, Griff Griffiths, Anna Lawlor, Sebastian Protheroe and Nour Alkltakji.

Adults

This event is of particular interest to anyone who has experience of, or works in mental health, IT, AI, Law, Governance and Regulation.

If you cannot book via the Eventbrite site simply, turn up at 15:30pm at the John Foster Drama Studio, Liverpool John Moores University, Hope Street, Liverpool. 

1st November