There aren’t many Sci-Fi plays around, so in that sense this is very welcome. It’s also hard to fault the staging and performances. The play itself, though, didn’t do much for me, I’m afraid.
It’s set in a British scientific research station on Pluto at some point in the future. Back on Earth the birds all fell out of the trees, then the trees all died. Meat is something grown in a petrie dish. The Americans are colonising Mars. Earth is clearly in a pretty bad way.
Our five characters are stranded and can no longer communicate with Earth. The clocks have stopped and there’s no daylight so they have no idea of the time of day or how many days have passed. As the play unfolds they become irrational, emotional and disorientated. They appear to hallucinate and odd things happen. Not all of the scenes seem to be consecutive and fragments of speech return, spoken by different characters.
It’s all very clever but it goes nowhere and just seemed to me to be stating the obvious – isolate five people for a long time and they’ll probably all go bonkers. I admired the craftsmanship, but Alistair McDowall’s play didn’t really engage me – and I rather like Sci-Fi as a genre. Still, it’s better than his last play https://garethjames.wordpress.com/2014/11/22/pomona which engaged me even less.
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