[In Space No One Can Hear the Smiths]
It is a testomony to the present that David Bowie is a extra topic of dialog and debate, however the music that’s performed just isn’t Space Oddity.
Written and directed by Luke Thornborough, Alone is a sci-fi drama about two astronauts on a return flight from a mission to a distant world that may maintain the important thing to reversing local weather change again on Earth.
Set within the management centre of a spaceship, the play is a contest of wills, ideologies and musical preferences between Taylor (Kat Glass), the scientist in control of the mission, and Holland (Courtney Bassett), the pilot who’s chargeable for getting them dwelling.
When the ship suffers a collision, the pair are compelled to confront what actually issues to every of them.
Like all good science fiction tales, Alone is about one thing deeply human: religion, and the human must create order out of chaos.
While it’s framed in non secular phrases, religion is available in many types – within the tools preserving them oriented and alive; within the potential of their analysis to avoid wasting the human race.
Both characters have needed to leap by way of a number of hoops with a purpose to get the place they’re. Without being specific, each characters’ struggles are outlined by entrenched patriarchy – it’s a miserable reflection of how present energy constructions have impeded progress, and pose an existential risk to everybody.
Despite being set sooner or later, the risk isn’t any completely different than now – the one improvement is that local weather catastrophe has reached near-apocalyptic proportions. As Taylor repeatedly factors out, those that would resist change to stop local weather change have merely moved the purpose posts.
One miserable revelation is that the mission just isn’t even a precedence – authorities on Earth have given up attempting to avoid wasting the planet, and have put their hopes in colonisation of different planets.
These two characters are alone in additional methods than one.
One of the pleasures of this manufacturing is its evocation of a wider world. Lots of this future is sketched by way of the characters’ dialogue, however this world-building can be supported by different components of the manufacturing
Adam Rohe’s set design is simply detailed sufficient to counsel the issues of a ship’s life assist programs, and simply restricted sufficient when it comes to house onstage to evoke the character’s more and more restricted choices for survival.
Michael Goodwin’s lighting enhances the set, slowly fading over the course of the present.
Courty Kayoss’s costume design is utilitarian and feels indebted to the ‘used’ aesthetic of seventies sci-fi films. It is a superb stylistic alternative because it reinforces the sense of historical past to characters who’ve been caught collectively for years.
While there are occasional voice calls from Phil, at Mission Control (voiced by Steve Austin), the play rests totally on the shoulders of Glass and Bassett.
Terse and empirical, Holland comes throughout as slightly brash and simple. Bassett’s dry and understated strategy enhances Glass’s extra uncovered Taylor. Ultimately, it’s a gradual burn of a efficiency, as Holland tries to maintain on high of an more and more not possible answer.
Taylor, a scientist with non secular religion, sees no contradiction between her function and beliefs. Glass provides Taylor a humour and keenness which are slowly stripped away because the ship falls aside, and her religion in God is whittled all the way down to one thing extra egomaniacal.
The two performers have a lived-in rapport, with an intimacy and awkwardness that means each their bodily familiarity and restraint to disclose essentially the most weak features of their inside lives.
Despite the bleakness of the situation, Alone finally carries a flicker of hope – a religion that one way or the other, a way we are able to learn to save ourselves.
Alone performs Loft at Q Theatre 16-18 February, 2023.