Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7.5/10

Cast: Daniel Bye.

The nature of the Philosopher, the very act of being, is one that is largely ignored and yet remains one of the most telling lines of all William Shakespeare’s plays. To be or not to be, the very nature of existence and the art of acting upon will or allowing events to be dictated to you, to feel alive, to need, to ache, to live, to feel, these are fundamental questions in which truth of reality is achieved and highlighted.

In Daniel Bye’s Error 404, not only is existence questioned, the act of feeling enquired about, but uncertainty in your own prejudice, in perhaps your own preconceptions of what constitutes life, are taken and how they might influence your other decisions. If you have no trouble turning off a machine that for a while in the mind replicated a young boy’s best friend and to whom helped the grieving process, then perhaps the ant is not be missed as it stamped upon or bombarded with chemical warfare. If on the other hand life is life then where does that feeling go from there, is all life sacred, even manufactured, artificial intelligence life?

Daniel Bye’s easy going nature shines through as he takes the audience down these trains of thought as he performs the narrative of a boy who did indeed lose his best friend and was replaced, with his mother’s help, by a created robot, but one who in the end could feel ache of hunger and thirst, even if it was simulated and perhaps feigned.

Error 404’s charm lays in its broad appeal, in the way it holds a sway over the young and those who have seen life in its fullest gesture and even the personal tragedy of loss. What Daniel Bye alludes to is acceptance and tolerance across the ages and defines what grief can do to those who have never experienced it before; that time does heal but there is no limit to how long that time must be. In the end, the signal of error 404 as a code is within us all, it is the signal that we cannot cope with some of the questions put to us, how does it feel, to be or not to be, in the end we are just human after all.

A tale that brings the family together, a charming piece of theatre lovingly told; Daniel Bye asks pertinent questions freely and with gentle authority.

Ian D. Hall