Ada Lovelace, AI, and poetical science – staging Ada at PyCon UK 2025
2 Sep 2025Hi Pythonistas, we’ve got an absolute treat of a blog post for you today! Our guest author is Emily Holyoake, playwright with Chronic Insanity. At PyCon UK 2025, Chronic Insanity will debut Ada as a rehearsed reading, and Emily has very kindly shared the story behind the play — from the inspiration and writing process, to what the piece means to her. A huge thank you to Emily for letting us peek behind the curtain!
My first notes for Ada are over a decade old. When I went back to the play earlier this year and read it again, one of my first thoughts was: it was a lot easier to think abstractly and optimistically about AI in 2014.
Why did I reread it? Because after delivering a keynote speech at PyCon UK 2023 about the development of Ada and the broader evolution of digital theatre, I was kindly contacted again this year to see if it would be possible to stage Ada at the 2025 conference.
After those initial thoughts and early drafts, Ada was in research and development through 2015-18, with a final version published in 2019. But the cogs of funding, venues, and partners never quite turned in sync, so the play was never performed for an audience. Until now!
This year, if you’re coming to PyCon UK, you’re warmly invited to a world premiere: Ada, staged as a rehearsed reading by Chronic Insanity, a Nottingham-based theatre company. It’s the first time – and possibly the only time! – anyone outside of the original R&D team will get to hear the script in full.
So what can you expect? Ada parallels the life and legacy of Ada Lovelace – often described as the first computer programmer – with a speculative story about a learning machine who composes music. In one side of the story, we follow Ada’s strict upbringing, her talent for mathematics and longing for the arts, her collaboration with Charles Babbage, and her unique insight into a new kind of machine: Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
Meanwhile, in a possible future, a robot called Ginny exists in a fixed 24 hour cycle where she receives the same dataset every morning, and then has her memory wiped every night. Within this cycle, she composes the same piece of music every day. As the story unfolds, this cycle is disrupted. Ginny starts having original experiences, creates original art to express those experiences, and potentially becomes a threat to herself and those around her. Throughout the play, the two stories overlap and intertwine, exploring how we become who we are, and how harnessing both science and art can help us shape unexpected futures.
Ada feels like a different play in 2025 than it did in the 2010s; in some ways, it already feels dated. When we talk about AI now, it’s usually as a shorthand for generative AI. Reading Ada in 2025, it seems quaint that any character would be surprised that Ginny can write new music – of course a machine can do that.
But at the same time, Ginny’s story is still wildly speculative. Nothing like her currently exists. A generative AI can compose new music, but it can’t create original art which expresses its unique experiences. As Ada herself said: ‘The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.’
Writing Ada also coincided with a peak of lauding her as a figurehead for women in STEM, particularly as Ada Lovelace Day celebrations grew in popularity and scale. To a theatre-maker who loves writing about tech, Ada’s story was immediately appealing – but the more I researched, the more frustrated I felt at how she’s remembered.
Ada died when she was only 36. Her output was limited, and consequently her impact was overlooked for decades. Her collaboration with Charles Babbage was often misunderstood (and sometimes actively misconstrued) as the student to a teacher, or the assistant to an inventor. But placing her as a STEM figurehead remembered for one big achievement – ‘the first computer programmer’ – flattens a lot of what makes her special.
For me, writing about Ada meant writing about how people do their best when they’re allowed, and encouraged, to be more than one thing. When we allow for ‘poetical science’ – Ada’s famous plea to intertwine scientific and artistic thinking – we’re creating the circumstances for unexpected things to happen. Like a play getting its premiere at a tech conference, years after it was written. Or like someone describing how a computer could work, and writing a programme for it, years before anything like it had ever been built.
I’m really grateful I’ve had this opportunity to revisit Ada, and so excited to team up with Chronic Insanity to bring the play to PyCon UK 2025. I hope you’ll join us on Friday 19 September for an evening of poetical science.
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