A vortex of diminishing returns
Having just hailed Mike Bartlett’s
Albion as my “play of the year”, I was all set to enthuse that, what with James Graham’s superlative
Ink too, the Almeida has been going from strength to strength in 2017. Then along comes this dud.
Or perhaps that should be da-didoo-dud. Even if you’ve never seen an episode of The Twilight Zone, the spooky, genre-twisting American TV series that led rapt viewers into the disorientating other-realm of the imagination, “the fifth dimension”, in the early Sixties, you’ll know that spine-tingly theme tune.
It’s universal shorthand for “weird goings-on” – and the use of that signature spider-dance across the keyboard in this adaptation of eight episodes from the original black-andwhite series (there were subsequent, updated spin-offs) is by far the most pulse-quickening aspect of a frustratingly maladroit evening.
I rather wish that the much-lauded American playwright Anne Washburn had taken The Twilight Zone episodes that most appealed, and left them intact – trusting them to work their own sinister magic. Her manic intercutting of the stories of Rod Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson creates more distracting confusion than composite enigma. Instead of thinking “The suspense is killing me”, it’s a case of: “Honey, they shrunk the show’s USP!”
The first impression isn’t of transcendental mystery but wall-towall ugliness: director Richard Jones wraps the stage in a dour star-field – and we’re looking at the action as if through a giant, retro TV.
That may neatly set up this theatrical caper as a homage to a cult classic – the low-tech monochrome approach a nod to the technical limitations of the period and its now-passé mannerisms. Yet the beauty of The Twilight Zone was the way that it opened up vast vistas and perturbing slants on our fragile sense of “reality”. The mood now inclines far too much to the tonguein-cheek, with lurking stagehands (in matching star-flecked garb) darting on to position stand-alone door frames and hand-rotate flimsy visual signs. Caught between the worlds of jest and earnest, it feels like we’re stuck in a vortex of diminishing returns.
The opening sequence sets the disjointed, stilted tone: a bunch of bus passengers are stranded (by an impassable bridge) in a bar, one of them may be a visitor from outer space. The cast are ranged awkwardly in a row, some of the American accents as wobbly as the set. We’re just getting hooked on the story when other tales start to intrude: the woman with her face bandaged from surgery because she needs her pretty features to conform to the ugly norm; the little girl who leaves her bedroom to get lost in the fourth dimension.
Two exceptionally gripping yarns – a man who daren’t go to sleep, and three airmen who return from space to face terrifying de-materialisation and spiralling self-doubt – are mangled, their momentum squandered.
It’s no surprise that the strongest component is the one that has been least tampered with: The Shelter shows neighbours coming to racially divisive near-blows over one of their number’s urgently sought-after nuclear shelter when the sirens threaten impending atomic attack. Nicely performed, it sits exactly on the right terrain between macabre humour and mind-spinning provocation, a relic of Cold War paranoia that speaks to today’s anxieties.
“Be assured that you will not plummet into an endless field of stars,” a narrator soothes, replicating the show’s famous to-camera addresses and capping a running-gag teasing us as to what we’re watching. Yet far from feeling creeped-out, I never once truly felt I had left my comfort zone.