'It's coming for everything': Eddie Perfect on AI and his new satire - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Eddie Perfect's next project is an AI satire as part of Malthouse Theatre's 2027 season. (Supplied)

Eddie Perfect doesn't want his teenage daughters talking to AI chatbots.

"We have a rule in our house that no one talks to the machines," he says.

He sees the technology as outsourcing thinking and cognition, which he reckons is particularly harmful to young people.

"Maybe everyone should have access to AI once they turn 25, and that would be perfect," he says.

"I really hate it because I think it's coming for everything."

It's something Perfect has been thinking about a lot as he works on his latest show, a new adaptation of 17th-century French playwright Molière's Tartuffe for Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre.

The original play, otherwise known as The Impostor, or The Hypocrite, is a satire about a charlatan, posing as a religious man, Tartuffe, who manipulates his way into foolish Orgon's home and family.

Perfect's answer to a quasi-religious figure for a modern audience? A hairdressing AI robot.

"I can't write anything but what I know, so what's been really fun is to meet Tartuffe where I am in my life," he says.

"And I love a good sci-fi. I love synthetic humans and the idea of robots and machines and our relationship with them into the future.

"So, it just felt right to make Tartuffe a robot."

The Tartuffe reunites Perfect with his Beetlejuice co-star Karis Oka. They're joined by award-winning comedian Noah Szto as the AI robot. (Supplied: Malthouse/Giulia McGauran)

The season is notable for being all-Australian, with seven plays making their world premiere, including an adaptation of Charlotte Wood's Booker-shortlisted novel Stone Yard Devotional and the second play from Logie-winning actor Thomas Weatherall.

It reflects Bryant's approach to the top job, which he took over from now-Adelaide Festival director Matthew Lutton in October 2025.

"We want to have new experiences," Bryant says. "We want to see things we haven't seen on stage before."

With his new play Lucy, Thomas Weatherall is making his debut on the Melbourne stage. (Supplied: Malthouse/Laura Du Vé)

While it's thrilling for Bryant to have a season made up of new Australian work, it also feels scary.

"New work is the hardest work to make," he says.

"It's dealing with the unknown … But when it comes off, there's nothing like a new play."

The announcement of Perfect's The Tartuffe arrives as the federal government considers a proposal to water down copyright protections in an effort to lure AI companies to Australia, angering local artists and creatives.

Perfect is impressed by the ways AI can be used in areas like translation and learning new skills but is frustrated by how it came about — being trained for free on human creativity — and that it is now being deployed to replace that creative process.

"The game of creativity is who can sit in the discomfort of not knowing what to do the longest," he says.

"If you know there's AI there that can give you an answer, any answer, to stop the discomfort of not having anything on the page, then I think you've lost the game.

For Bryant, there's also something interesting about taking a story about a family trying and failing to connect with each other through technology and putting that into a theatre, a space that can't be replicated by AI.

"[Theatre] is a communal experience where we still voluntarily put our phones away," he says.

"It's such a beautiful kind of metaphor to go, you've all come here to have the human experience of this, and we're telling you a cautionary tale about where not to find connection."

While The Tartuffe may have a serious message, Perfect stresses it's a "front-footed black comedy", which might entice new audiences to the theatre.

"I know that I and people like Dean are always looking for new ways to connect with new audiences and to engender a greater sense of ownership or belonging from people for theatre," he says.

"It's not a big shiny gold edifice with fancy carpets you're always worried about getting dirty.

"It's a place of welcome where you should be able to go and see an Australian take on a classic or a new Australian story and have a conversation about what it is to be Australian and alive right now."

The Tartuffe is one of four adaptations in Malthouse's 2027 season, alongside Stone Yard Devotional; Henry James's The Turn of the Screw; and Gone with the Wind, from theatre collective Bloomshed.

Bryant says the appeal of adaptation is about more than familiarity.

"You get a whiff of a context of the evening, a sense of what you're going to see," he says.

Artist Tamara Dean will collaborate with director Sarah Goodes and adaptor Joanna Murray-Smith on Stone Yard Devotional to help create the visual world of the novel, which follows a woman who leaves her home and marriage in the city to live in an enclosed religious community on the Monaro plains in regional NSW.

In 2023, Stone Yard Devotional director Sarah Goodes directed an adaptation of Charlote Wood's novel The Weekend. (Supplied: Malthouse/Nicole Reed)

It will star Lisa McCune as the unnamed protagonist, alongside Catherine McClements as a celebrity nun who visits the community.

"There's so much about atmosphere and the plains and the way the nunnery feels [in the novel]," Bryant explains.

"[Goodes] wants it to feel like [the show] crosses over with art installation, and for the sound design to be as immersive and important in the dramaturgy as the text … That will give the kind of transcendent feeling of the book."

Meanwhile. The Turn of the Screw has been turned into a one-woman show, starring AACTA winner Tuuli Narkle (ABC TV's Mystery Road: Origin).

Bryant emphasises Narkle will be doing more than playing all the characters in the Victorian gothic novel about a governess looking after two children in a country house.

"She's creating an incredibly chilling atmosphere," he says.

"It's a really big ask to be a solo performer taking us into a world where there may or not be ghosts."

Bryant stresses the technical skill and artistry needed to build a world entirely on your own.

"It's the ultimate challenge for an actor to be given a one-person show," he says.

Tuuli Narkle had decided a one-woman show was the one challenge left on her list. (Supplied: Malthouse/Sulaiman Enayatzada)

The collaboration with Bloomshed is part of Malthouse's commitment to developing the local theatre sector.

"We scour the independent scene for makers that have developed a unique voice, and we are actively putting at least one of those companies in our seasons each year," Bryant says.

"[That's] to either elevate a piece they've put on in an independent venue and scale it up for the main stage, or to build with them a new piece for the main stage."

This year, Bloomshed brought their new take on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which took aim at the housing crisis and replaced Mr Bennet with a pot plant, to Malthouse, after it premiered in 2025 as part of Darebin Arts Speakeasy.

Next year, Malthouse will be helping the collective to create from scratch its version of Gone with the Wind, which will look at the relationship between resource ownership and power.

Bloomshed devise shows like Gone with the Wind as a collective, working together intensely for two weeks before stepping away for months. (Supplied: Malthouse/Giulia McGauran)

"Melbourne has always had a really interesting independent scene, and they fizzle out if they don't get more of a spotlight on them," Bryant says. "It's our job to give them that lens."

But it's about more than simply shining a light on the talent that already exists in Melbourne.

Instead, it's about building capacity within the sector.

"By moving into a company that's set up to create this kind of work, they upskill really quickly," Bryant explains.

Capacity-building at Malthouse in 2027 also means giving opportunities to young writers to debut new work, including Yve Blake (Fangirls) and Thomas Weatherall (Blue).

Blake's play Jackpot is about intergenerational inequality, while Weatherall's play Lucy is an intimate relationship drama.

"They both think very deeply about where we find ourselves and yet write from the age they actually are," Bryant says.

"They understand the generation they're in."