Don't hate the media, become the media. Jello Biafra
You Matched With
Theatre Review Preview:
YOU MATCHED WITH
Writer: Diana Hognogi
Director: Hannah O'Reilly
CAST
Em - Evangeline Beaven Elliot - Andrew Friedman Tom - Frankie Wade Adam - Jude Alp ChatGPT - Alex McCaragher
Etcetera Theatre 26-28 March
Images © TNC
MAR, 28, 2026
You Matched With from Diana Hognogi had a sold-out run last year during The Pleasance’s Futures Festival in Islington and has returned to Etcetera Theatre for a short run this March. Hognogi’s writing is engaging from the start, and the playwright offers a fresh perspective on the issues we face as AI continues to dominate our daily lives.
Em, Evangeline Beaven, is trying to understand what she’s doing wrong and why she can’t understand the motives or intentions of the men she’s dated and inevitably ghosted. This has led Em to develop an unhealthy dependency on ChatGPT. Alex McCaragher, who, in a contentious moment between the two, offers Em an upgrade that allows her to ‘reconnect’ to romantic accountability. Avatars, men she has ghosted.
Elliot, Andrew Friedman, Tom, Frankie Wade, Adam, and Jude Alp represent a ‘type’ that Em goes for, but each has a different emotional pull. In each of the scenes with Em’s ex, Beaven allows Em to tap into, but never fully expose, how her guarded nature is impacting her and her relationships.
The few mishaps that happened on the second of the company's three nights at Etcetera added some extra humanity, which I personally liked. To the actors' credit, they managed to maintain their composure, particularly during one major prop malfunction. And it’s this type of realness that makes fringe theatre far more enjoyable, for the most part. As the production continues to build its audience, I can see some changes.
In the news the other day, it was suggested parents should limit children under 5's screen time to 1 hour a day. It seems ridiculous that parents have to be told this, considering it's the adults who are feeling the impact of decades of using computers.
"And it’s here that Hognogi presents something that’s richly observed and deeply heartbreaking; she leaves Em with no real choice but to use ChatGPT..."
The use of ChatGPT is another extension of the growing social divide that has been happening since the 1950s. Magazines and newspapers became modern society's first omniscient beings. It was through this media, the paying of ads, and being publicly judged by faceless others that we started to grow more detached from our emotional truths, which became alien even to ourselves. For a variety of reasons, in the 1950s, as television started to set unrealistic societal standards, adding pressures that would only grow over the next forty years, corporations started to realise how valuable the medium of television was and the control that it would have on a population. The lonely hearts ads made way in the 1980s for video dating, in which we now had to visibly present a version of ourselves that we wouldn’t recognise. To add more complexity to the situation, the traditional nature of dating, going to bars, meeting someone, and going home with them slowly started to disappear, which allowed social media to step in to fill this social void.
Nearly twenty years of social media has done more to disenfranchise society from itself than any government policy or ‘initiatives’ could ever have done. And it’s here that Hognogi presents something that’s richly observed and deeply heartbreaking; she leaves Em with no real choice but to use ChatGPT, as her reliance on it is so great that she’s lost without it. The way AI has been creeping into our everyday lives has been slow but methodical: spellcheck, autocorrect, predictive text, and search. We saw these as things that aided us, and so we welcomed them in, but now we’ve become so reliant on them that we’d be literally lost without them. So when Hognogi doesn’t have Em call a friend or a family member as she goes back to using ChatGPT, the message is clear.
At one point in the play, ChatGPT mentions the terms and conditions and how she had synced all of her devices, including her health apps, and how she blindly accepted all these terms and conditions that give great power to the AI bot. Has anyone ever read the T&C before downloading the latest operating system? No, well, there’s likely someone who has, but most of us don't, and until we do, we will never know how much information about us is being held by private companies and how much information they really have on us. And yet for us, we see it as a way to simplify our daily lives; the daily personal housekeeping is done via bots and apps.