A missive from inside a bold, personal project
Playwright Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini writes from amidst a new play about the future of the British care system
Review by Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini | Originally published in the print edition, October 24th 2025
Tomorrow’s care beckons today’s ghosts.
In 2012 when I began writing A.I.D.A.N (Artificial Intelligent Domestic Android by NetecholoG.), a play following a disabled woman and her robotic care android, I thought I was inventing a far horizon. Yet unfinished scenes always drag me back to the present: policies that read like bad dystopia, the quiet brutality of a system built for efficiency not humanity.
Did you know that in the UK one in four working-age adults is disabled?1 These numbers aren’t speculative; they are present tense. My future is already here, just unevenly distributed.
Writing this play feels like assembling a spaceship while the ground keeps shifting. My body and mind are both launchpad and weather report. Chronic pain dictates draft schedules whilst fatigue rearranges character arcs. I keep my phone by my bed for those 2am bolts of dialogue because by morning, my joints may stage a coup.
The writing becomes rehearsal for the world I want: one that adapts to every kind of body. Every pause is a quiet refusal of the work-obsessed pace that sees rest as weakness and not wisdom.
Interdependence sits at the heart of this vision, the truth that none of us thrive alone. Disabled people have long practiced interdependence: shared access, collective care, and creative survival. What if these values shaped our technologies, our theatres, our futures?
Zohra (the protagonist) receives a government-issued humanoid-robotic-carer designed to solve the historic underfunding and understaffing within the care sector. Her A.I.D.A.N measures her vitals with military precision while ignoring her autonomy, like an overzealous smartwatch with a God complex.
Through Zohra’s lessons in sarcasm, pain and the unquantifiable art of simply being, her A.I.D.A.N. begins to develop something like empathy.
The play asks: can a programmed intelligence grasp its place inside adult social care and override its ableist coding to shield its user from the system’s harm?
And if it can, what excuse do we have?
Dramatising ableism is harder than dramatising a murder. A punch is visible; a policy loophole is not. Ableism is coded into our architecture, language, and the quiet bureaucracy of waiting, a design flaw disguised as order. How do you stage an algorithm of indifference? How do you spotlight a policy’s silent chokehold?
I’m experimenting with sound and movement and imagining futures that reveal the machinery of now.
The play keeps asking how we tell the story, blending live theatre with digital elements so parts unfold beyond the stage.
I write dialogue where characters debate ‘efficiency’ in tones so reasonable the cruelty sneaks up on the audience.
The most violent systems are often disguised as neutral.
Speculative fiction loves a gleaming utopia: chrome cities, care bots that never need charging. I’m drawn to the wiring under the chrome, a future worth living in, defined by who gets to rest, to love, to decide.
I don’t believe in the shiny white supremacist technocracies. I believe in a world that stays malleable, where design bends toward those who need it most. I dream of a society where disabled people shape infrastructure, because building for the most marginalised sustains everyone.
A world where non-disabled people recognise themselves in disabled characters, and in turn, disabled civil rights and our shared liberation.
A world where care is mutual, messy, funded, joyful and where technology supports rather than surveils.
The irony of speculative writing is that the speculation is often the least fictional part. The real gamble is believing we could train not only machines but ourselves toward radical empathy, anti-ableism, anti-capitalism and liberation in all its forms. That a play could whisper into policy chambers, legislators and designers who shape the care sector.
Finishing the next draft thrills and unnerves me. It’s my boldest, most personal project; years of research and navigating a dehumanising system pinned to a speculative frame that might outlive me.
Adult social care runs on a quiet suspicion of the very people it claims to serve, a suspicion rooted in ableism and the long shadow of eugenics. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. We can design something new, shaped by those who know what it means to depend on it and to dream beyond it.
In giving Zohra and her A.I.D.A.N. room to grow, I practice believing that systems can too. Proving that the present isn’t inevitable.
This play feels like a final transmission from a ship drifting into the sun. Time and hope unravel, as I reach across the void to send one last message home.
The future I’m writing casts the cosmos as a shattered reflection, incomplete, distorting what we think we see.
I hope audiences leave not questioning whether AI can care, but confronting why our current systems so often fail us. Perhaps technology’s greatest promise is not replacing us but equipping us with the tools needed to liberate one another.
Matilda Feyiṣayọ Ibini is a multi-award-winning bionic, Queer playwright, screenwriter and (occasional) facilitator from London. Matilda has Limb Girdle Muscular Dystrophy and is a wheelchair user, and writes for stage, TV, film, audio and books.
Source: Statistics from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and The House of Commons Library and GOV.UK indicate that this figure stands at around 10.2 to 10.5 million people.
Working-Age Population:
Data from October to December 2023 showed that 10.21 million working-age (16 to 64) people in the UK reported being disabled, which is 24% of the working-age population.
 | A guest post by
|