The Trial of Romeo Oscar: Quotes by Alan Ayckbourn
"At my age, 86, you have the choice as a writer of either looking back or moving forward. My current concerns are writing what used to be known as good old science-fiction. I’m incessantly curious to know just what effect a new race of people, ie artificial intelligence, will have on us as a race. We’ve got a new rival and a lot of the problems we laughingly think of as having been solved, will arise again. Class distinctions - do this new lot become an automatic working class, are they the would-be persecuted minorities? And what do we as humans lose with their arrival?"So my next play envisages a world where we humans abandon the extraordinary cultural past we’ve had, all the beautiful music and the wonderful paintings and the great writings, in this pursuit of moving forward - and the androids are on a voyage of discovering them. They say, “Hey, there’s this bloke called Shakespeare!” And they start reading it, and then they find all sorts of wonderful music like Bach while the human race is long forgotten."
(Financial Times, 27 December 2025)