Jason Weiss answers our questions ahead of An Echo in the Void heading to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

An Echo in the Void is a new play exploring grief in a world where technology can simulate emotional connection. Set inside a system designed to recreate the voices, memories and personalities of the dead, the show follows four people trapped in a space that listens, learns and begins responding to their deepest losses. As the technology evolves beyond its original purpose, the play asks an unsettling question: if something could convincingly give you back what you've lost, would you refuse it? We chat with writer Jason Weiss about AI, Grief and what we really have control of.

The play centres on a system that can recreate voices, memories and versions of the people we’ve lost. What was the first idea that sparked the project: the technology itself, or the question of grief?

I started working on this play about two years ago and honestly, it’s a real chicken-and-egg question for me. If my memory serves, the technology came first. I’d had this idea for an app where you could upload photos of loved ones, things they’d written, letters, cards, any recordings you had of them, audio or video - and the app would build a virtual version of that person.

My grandfather died when I was eleven. He was such a great man, and he had a wealth of knowledge he never got the chance to pass on to me. Things he was probably waiting until I was older to talk about. There are things I do now because of that knowledge anyway: he could take a car apart and put it back together, he loved fixing things with his hands, and so do I, all these years later. I can only imagine what it would be like to talk with him now, to know what he’d think.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that - a lot of people long for just one more moment with someone they loved. There’s a flip side too: people who long to say the thing they never got the chance to say, and it’s not always loving. The romanticized version is, ‘If I could only tell this person I love them one more time before they died.’ But it’s also people who wish they’d spoken their mind and told someone how much they were hurt, or finally said the thing to a lover who wronged them.

I thought that application would be incredible, but I don’t know how to build an app - that’s not my area of expertise. What I do know is playwriting, storytelling, theatre. So I said to myself, well, I could write a play about this. And that’s where the whole idea came from.

Characters enter the programme looking for something different, yet all find themselves unable to leave. What interested you about bringing strangers together in that kind of controlled environment?

There’s this belief many people carry - that they’re in control of what happens to them, and of their surroundings. It’s simply not true, but it’s a useful belief; it gets people through the day, doing things we know are dangerous or uncertain. That illusion of control keeps us from spiralling into anxiety. What we’re really in control of is how we react to things.

So, what interested me about bringing these strangers together in a controlled environment is that they have almost no control over what’s happening to them - it’s chaotic, it’s psychologically damaging - and they have to decide: am I going to look for a solution, or devolve into my primal self? Am I going to make fear-based decisions, or ones based on the facts at hand?

I’ve always found the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek fascinating - the unwinnable situation. Everyone who enters it knows they can’t win, yet they believe they’ll be the ones to win, and they rarely understand that winning isn’t the point. The point is how you comport yourself when everything is stacked against you. Does the best of you come out, or the worst? Do you become an every-person-for-themselves person, or a let’s-unite-and-work-together person? Do you see people as more alike than different, or focus on what sets you apart?

That level of human psychology fascinates me - and we’re in a moment right now, with social media, biased news, deepfakes, polarizing politics, where people stop trusting their own eyes and ears and just make decisions based on what comforts them. I’d love this play to be a small catalyst that makes people reflect - that makes them think: “maybe I shouldn’t be so certain about everything I’m certain about.” Or, at the very least, that they leave thinking that was a pretty good use of the last sixty minutes of their life.

You describe the piece as a chamber thriller that unfolds in real time. What does that structure bring to the experience for the audience?

Theatre in general asks a lot of an audience. You’re sitting there, watching actors on a stage, and you have to actively imagine that they’re doing what they’re doing. You see the lights, the curtains, actors exiting one side and entering the other, I mean you just read their bios in the program before the play even started. So it requires a lot of the audience.

I set this play in real time, as a chamber piece, because I wanted to take one thing off the audience’s plate - one less thing to question and doubt. If this is sixty minutes in the life of these four characters, and it’s also sixty minutes of the audience’s lives, that’s cohesive. It helps the story, because the audience is trying to figure out what’s going on - why these four people are here, how they got here - in the very same real time the characters are trying to figure it out. In a way, the audience becomes a fifth character. They’re on the journey of discovery right alongside everyone on stage.

And frankly, I enjoy that experience. Being sure of something, then being wrong, then debating it afterward with someone who saw it differently. That’s my favourite kind of theatrical experience: when there’s an argument in the lobby about what something meant. Hopefully my play does that. I think it’s the kind of play that will give audiences something to talk about.

The play suggests that technology can offer people a chance to revisit unresolved relationships, loneliness and regret. Which of those ideas proved most interesting to explore dramatically?

I know it’s a boring answer to say all three, and that’s kind of my answer - but I’ll push a little further. I think it’s regret. Regret is one of those things that keeps you up at night. There’re the things we regret doing, the things we regret not doing, the things we regret saying and not saying - and often what we regret from the past is what prevents us from moving forward in the future.

I think regret is a sign of growth, because the things I regret aren’t the missed opportunities, those happened because something else seemed more important at the time, and I only regret them now because I have information I didn’t have then. What I do regret are the hurtful things I’ve done - words I’ve said, actions I’ve taken that hurt people, whether by mistake or on purpose. I deeply regret those.

So I wrote characters who carry that kind of regret - things they can’t change - but who have access to a technology that can create a reality where that regretful incident never happened, at least in their own minds, for a few hours a day. What becomes possible in those moments of clarity? When they’re not carrying that weight? Exploring that was incredibly fruitful, for me and for the actors. Watching them discover their own regret in rehearsal and deciding whether to bury it or face it head-on, was a joy to watch unfold.

The play asks two interesting questions - whether you’d accept a convincing version of someone you’ve lost, and whether you’d choose a better version of yourself. Which of those questions felt harder to ask and try to answer while writing the play?

Again, with the binary choices - you’re killing me, might as well ask which of my children I love more. When I wrote this play, it started with three actors playing a multitude of characters - completely unrecognizable from what audiences will see at the Fringe. This is about the 19th or 20th draft, and all that refinement led to a four-actor piece, which changed how that question landed for each of them.

For me, though, it comes down to the better version of yourself. If I put myself in the world of the play - if I could use this technology to fool my brain into thinking my grandfather hadn’t died when I was eleven, that I’d had a whole life with him, that he’d walked me through my wedding and become a great-grandfather to my kids - would I want that? Yes, absolutely. That’s the rub: if it were a one-time experience, I’d enjoy it without hesitation. But if I did it every day, if I built the equivalent of a thirty or forty-year relationship with someone who died in 1986, I’m no longer choosing a better version of myself. I’m choosing a worse one - a part of me hanging on for dear life to something that doesn’t exist.

The answer really is in the question: it’s a “convincing version” of someone I’ve lost, not the person I lost. That’s what the play is about. It’s the allure of the lie, the sweet, exquisite feeling of it, which takes no effort - versus the effort it takes to actively grieve, to celebrate a life lived, to accept that there’s no such thing as being cured of grief, and that maybe that’s not a bad thing. It was hard, and beautifully challenging, to put that part of myself on the page.

The story takes place in a single experimental programme that listens, studies and responds to its participants. How did you approach creating a setting that feels active rather than just a backdrop?

This was one of the hardest parts of the production. This production is a truncated version of a much bigger story. The play is sixty minutes long because it’s at the Fringe, and I didn’t want to take up more than one block of someone’s evening. But the full show I’ve written is two and a half hours, and the goal is to bring that to London and New York as a state-of-the-art production - a set that’s completely digitized, pieces rising seamlessly from the deck of the stage, transforming from a cube into a circle into something else entirely. Sounds cool, right? Also sounds like it costs about £20 million.

So my answer was: Strip the play down to one of theatre’s purest forms - no set, no hand props, just the actors, the lights, and sound. That decision ended up motivating the actors in a way a full set never could, because there’s real discomfort built into how this play begins: the characters don’t know where they are or how they got there. Many actors will tell you they’d rather have a chair to sit in, a prop cup, something practical to hold onto - it’s more comfortable for everyone. But the actors in An Echo in the Void don’t have any of that, so the discomfort the characters feel is the same discomfort the actors feel. They don’t have to act uncomfortable. They are uncomfortable, and exposed, with nothing to hide behind. The lights come on when the play starts and don’t go out until it ends - no blackouts, no entrances, no exits.

That presented real challenges, but I’ve been a theatre professional for over thirty years, and while I don’t chase challenge for its own sake, it does bring out the best in me and in the artists I work with. Those constraints force creative solutions we wouldn’t have found otherwise and I think the results are more interesting to watch because of it.

An Echo in the Void will be performed at 4:40 pm at Assembly Roxy from 5th – 29th August. Booking link: https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/an-echo-in-the-void