Ada

By Emily Holyoake

Play about Ada Lovelace, the first computer and Artificial Intelligence today. Suitable for schools, colleges and youth groups.Offers good roles for girls/women to perform relating to STEM subjects.

“You may turn the handle, and I will whirr and calculate without error!”

Decades before the first computers are built, Ada imagines machines that can do anything, even compose beautiful pieces of music. Far beyond Ada’s future, a learning machine called Ginny breaks free of her routine and tests the boundaries of what ought to be possible.ADA is an intricate re-telling of the life and legacy of Ada Lovelace, pioneer of computing, paralleling her history with a contemporary story about the potential of artificial intelligence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aurora Metro Books
• Release date: Feb 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912430109

Book preview

Emily Holyoake

Emily Holyoake is a playwright and dramaturg from Derby. Her plays include Stasis (White Bear Theatre), Real Person Fiction (Exeter Phoenix), and April (The Bike Shed Theatre). She has worked with companies and collectives including Encompass Productions, New Perspectives Theatre Company, The Party Somewhere Else, In Good Company, New Model Theatre, and Peter Nicholson Films.

First published in the UK in 2019 by Aurora Metro Publications Ltd.

67 Grove Avenue, Twickenham, TW1 4HX

www.aurorametro.com [e-mail]

Ada copyright © 2019 Emily Holyoake

Cover image copyright © 2019 Samantha Theobald-Roe

Production: Peter Fullagar

With many thanks to: Marina Tuffier and Angie Thorpe.

All rights are strictly reserved.

For rights enquiries including performing rights, please contact the publisher: [e-mail]

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This paperback is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed in the UK by 4edge Limited.

ISBNs:

978-1-912430-09-3 (print)

978-1- 912430-10-9(ebook)

Ada

By

Emily Holyoake

To Mum, Dad, Jess, and Ben, for the trouble-shooting, problem-solving, and breakthroughs.

Acknowledgements

ADA could not and would not have been written without the work and support of the following people: Adam McCready, Julia Locascio, Gemma Barkerwood, Sophie Barkerwood, Louise Croft, Rebecca Little, Kate Chapman, Giles Croft, Jeannie Dickinson, Jim Findley, Ben Gilbert, Jessica Holyoake, Gareth Morgan, and Sylvia Robson.

ADA was originally developed by Poetical Machines, in collaboration with Haiku Salut and Julia Locascio, supported by Arts Council England and Nottingham Playhouse.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ADA

Introduction

I never really mind when the first question people ask me about Ada Lovelace is, Who?, because before I started writing ADA, I’d never heard of her either. At school I focused on drama, music, and English, and only worked hard at things like maths out of a deep fear of academic failure. There wasn’t any one person in my life steering me towards the humanities and away from the sciences, but there was very little overlap between the two. Even if Ada Lovelace had been on the history syllabus, I’m not sure her story would’ve felt relevant to the future I hoped I would have in the theatre.

Augusta Ada King (née Byron), Countess of Lovelace, was commonly known as Ada Lovelace. She was born in 1815 and died in 1852, aged just 36. Her childhood was marked by fruitless efforts to control and negate the influence of the arts upon her development. Ada had no memories of her father, the poet Lord Byron, but his ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ legacy concerned her mother deeply; in an attempt to impose discipline over her character, Ada was given an unusually rigorous schooling in mathematics. As she grew up, however, she developed not only a number of interests across art and science, but a desire to unite the two schools of thought. She once referred to this idea as ‘poetical science’. It’s not far away from the modern concept of STEAM – a movement calling for the reunion of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) with their long-lost cousin, the Arts.

In