Natalie Robbie embodies Eileen, an influencer, the fun and flawless beauty guru on camera, while off camera, a woman who stays confined in her flat, self analyzing to the point of obsession. Lost and devoid of personality, without truly knowing who she is off camera, she is presented with an opportunity to optimize her online presence with an AI twin – believable, given her lack of a sense of self

The set is strategically placed to convey Eileen’s inner and public life — a giant beanbag for doom scrolling, with delivery parcels, snacks and clothes scattered across the floor — the space of someone with money but without the time or taste to spend it. Stage left is a projection screen which plays social media posts and reels. Centre stage is a shrine of sorts, where she films her videos, complete with jade roller, a comically large influencer headband, a matcha set, and the outline of a ring light skillfully lit across the stage. The lighting through the majority of the show was a pale pink, an atmospheric nod to living within some sort of girlie-pop Instagram filter.

It’s enjoyable to see Hanni Heinrich having fun, playing the robotic AI twin, Aileen, complete with a matching “clean girl” pajama set and headband as Eileen. Throughout, she spews various rhetoric on self care, physical improvement and how to enhance online performance. Eileen’s mother –

and the Algorithm, played by Heike Brunner, gives us a window into the outside, as well as online, world — a point of pressure for Eileen’s career and her personal life.

As our protagonist delves into a surface level AI psychosis, she upgrades and relies more and more on the AI version of herself. We see her, bit by bit lose her anonymity across the plot. She even addresses the audience, as her subscribers, blaming them for pressuring her into it, for not being perfect enough, beautiful enough, effortless enough. It was an interesting confrontation between online and live audiences.

As viewers of this show, we are faced with an interaction of one of the oldest forms of live entertainment, met with AI, one of the most recent forms of “entertainment”. AI has been met with fear and understandable outrage by, at least, the talented artistic community. This play is more interested in exploring its relevance when it comes to consciousness and human connection. Are we losing our ability to interact with messy, flawed, living, breathing human beings? After the curtain call, people discussed, laughed and lingered in each others’ company, honoring the show’s message: Keep human contact, human bonds, human exchange, alive.

As AI models pass the Turing Test, I sat down for coffee with Hanni Heinrich, writer and producer of Eileen:Aileen, a new AI tech-satire starring herself and Natalie Robbie as an influencer and her AI twin. It is currently running at Kapstaadt Toneelhuis from the 10th till 12th, and the 18th till the 20th of September 2026.

Alex: I believe you started as a journalist, and then you moved on to acting. You’re also writing this play. Obviously, the writing styles and the mediums are very different, but how do you approach that with your background of journalism?

Hanni: This specific play, I approached it very non-journalistic. It was when I had my babies, I thought, I’ll take a break because they are so small, and I want to be there for them. I’m playing the AI. And I always wanted to play this creature, an enigmatic creature that is kind of human-like, but it’s not human. So that was just a desire from that point of view. And I developed the character first. And then I thought, now we have the character, where does it live? What happens? And then I created a home around it. That was with that specific play. Other things that I’ve written in the very creative field, I started off with research. What is a topic that is timely? And then I dug into research and like the usual target group, who could be interested? Do we have that already? Is it interesting or not?

A: In terms of the other characters, tell me a little bit about them.

H: So you’ve got the influencer. Of course, we have an AI, and the AI cannot live without a human. And. I thought, this is one entity. They belong together. It’s an AI, so they are together. That was clear. And then the algorithm/mother is kind of presenting information for us based on our user experience. So in my interpretation, the algorithm is the mother of the AI. And the mother, the human mother, also runs her own… program, in her child. Two mothers, holding the strings.

A: What made you want to add the influencer element? What made you want to tackle the human persona versus the AI persona?

H: Very simple. Everyone, the whole world, the whole industry is talking about it. “You need to be visible. You need to be visible. You need to have social media.” I struggle with that. To be honest, I can put up a nice picture. I can put up an audition or something. But I never really found freedom. And that’s why the idea came. There’s a whole industry out there. The influencer industry. The creator industry. They have to be visible because that’s their business, right? They want to sell. At the end of the day, everyone wants to sell. Who are they? It’s a persona. Some are talking openly about it. Some not.

A: How does it feel, acting out something that you have written? Once you’ve written the script, how easy is it for you to separate?

H: It was challenging. It was a very interesting process. I had good days where I could take that hat off easily. And say, I have this vision now. I know exactly what I want to do here, it’s very easy…But then I had days where I thought I really had to take my time to get into character. Or come out of it and say, now I’m producing. Do that seriously. I wouldn’t say it’s difficult or not difficult.

A: In the artistic world, where you’re seeing AI coming into play more and more in art, how do you personally feel about that?

H: It’s very unsettling but fascinating at the same time, what is possible. When it comes to art, I believe in human skills. I believe in humans. But having AI as a tool, it does save us time, but it can only do so much. I think in general AI is a great tool to do boring work to support human beings, but I strongly believe in rules and regulations within AI, there must be ethics. It’s very unsettling. I think of it as something powerful, and we humans must be very careful that this powerful tool doesn’t go to the wrong hands, like in a fairytale.