Spooky sci-fi spaceship where your eerie dreams come to life
Solaris is a sci- fi story beloved of chinstroking intellectuals everywhere. it’s best known as the andrei Tarkovsky film from 1972, or maybe the steven soderbergh version, starring George Clooney, made 30 years later. Both were based on the novel by Polish sci-fi writer stanislaw lem.
What gets the eggheads excited is that it raises big questions about the nature of consciousness. My biggest problem with both films was not so much figuring out their meaning as simply staying awake.
The tale is of a weirdly sentient distant planet, solaris, that has developed its own consciousness and begun haunting the minds of the crew on a spaceship. adding creepiness to downright weirdness, it brings their dreams to eerie life.
Never mind figuring out what it all means, i found both films potently soporific. so the first great achievement of David Greig’s fleet-footed new stage adaptation is that i didn’t nod off.
The second is Hyemi shin’s white box set-design that recreates the spaceship’s multiple interiors with the slick, sixties finish of star Trek’s Enterprise. shin’s staging conjures multiple locations: portals and passages; labs and sleeping quarters. Between the story’s short scenes a huge shutter blinks over the widescreen stage and the heaving waters of the surface of solaris are projected, as if from a dream.
Directed by australian Matthew lutton, the show aspires to the state of virtual reality, thanks to the shifting colours of Paul Jackson’s lighting, and Jethro Woodward’s wraparound sound design, which makes you feel like you’re on board the spaceship itself.
Even so, i couldn’t help feeling sorry for the actors who have to compete with the seamless spectacle for attention. indeed, the set gets to do more acting than the cast — sometimes literally, thanks to a video turn from Matrix and lord of The rings star Hugo Weaving, who plays the ship’s former captain, now deceased.
The sex of the new skipper has been switched, with the casting of Polly Frame, and while this is of little consequence, she is no George Clooney. Frame is wholesome, cheerful, occasionally quite concerned. But the role needs big-name charisma to mesmerise us with the story of a woman haunted by a long dead lover.
as that lover, Keegan Joyce is more flamboyant — albeit increasingly plagued by his own arcane questions about the status of his consciousness as the embodiment of a memory from someone else’s brain (we can but sympathise). Yes, you’re right: without giving too much away, there are at least two dead people on the prowl.
supporting roles are despatched efficiently but are sketchy. instead, it’s the set which — like solaris itself — hogs the limelight.
FasT, at london’s bijou Park Theatre, is no less peculiar, in a different way. it’s the true story of quack dietician linda Hazzard, who believed you could starve yourself into good health.
she operated out of a sanitarium called Wilderness Heights in Washington state and would, doubtless, prosper in Hollywood today. Between 1908 and 1912, she is believed to have killed 19 people — before doing the same for herself in 1938. Directed by Kate Valentine, there’s never any doubt, in
Kate Barton’s 70-minute melodrama, that Hazzard was bona fide bonkers.
Played by Caroline Lawrie, her bulging searchlight eyes sweep the audience and chill the blood. She holds forth with speeches of self-exoneration while swindling, isolating, and starving gullible patients. The only thing missing is a moustache for her to twirl. With Natasha Cowley and Jordon Stevens as two of the hapless victims and Daniel Norford as a local reporter, it’s a slight but diverting piece of social history.