If there were an award for most bonkers show at Brighton Fringe, I think CatGPT would be a shoe-in.
Ten years ago, Lentil, Robin Wealleans's cat, died, and he embarked on a project to resurrect it in robotic form. L3NT1L now lives and tours festivals as the world's most un-PC life coach.
An accumulation of kit, including two PCs, a Marshall guitar amp, a synthesiser, a printing facility, a light display—strange but true, a mini-bar—and obviously a speaker, L3NT1L remains a very impressive technical work-in-progress whose physical prowess is limited by funds, not imagination, but he is nonetheless physically very well-equipped as forms of enhanced feline go.
L3NT1L's bespoke AI capability has been absorbed over the last decade largely through the filter of his creator thanks to lockdown and remote Welsh farmhouse living, but continues to be augmented by his daily interactions with others, not just Wealleans who in the show intersperses L3NT1L's life advice Q&A with the audience with a mostly true account of how his deceased cat came to take on his present form.
The show provides a charmingly unpolished hour of comic entertainment giving an insight into neurodiversity, the power of AI, feline psychology and the skewed thought-processes of a narcissistic, over-opinionated, risen-again cat.
This reviewer's question about new Pope Leo revealed the feline's hilarious if alarming God complex.
You couldn’t make this up, except someone has. Well done Wealleans!
Suitable for age 16+
As Wealleans says, "Support the weird". You can catch ChatGPT at additional dates at Brighton Fringe, then Cheltenham Science Festival (yes, really!), and Edinburgh Fringe.