Space saga of mystery and drama
Sci-fi classic reworked into stylish odyssey
Solaris (Edinburgh Lyceum) Verdict: A stellar production ★★★★I
GIVEN that the Russians made a film, in true space-race style, as a retort to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, it is surprising how few people have heard of Solaris.
Perhaps it’s because Stanislaw Lem’s novel offers an alternate universe to almost every alien encounter movie ever made.
This space saga eschews galactic battles, death stars, and wisecracking robots. Instead, it offers acres and acres of metaphysical ambiguity and introspective stillness.
Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation in 1972 has been called a masterpiece, although it missed out Lem’s playful sense of humour – or maybe Russian humour, like French pop music, is an acquired taste.
In 2002, another attempt by Hollywood director Steven Soderbergh turned a baffling and philosophical novel even in its most lucid passages into a slow, ambiguous downer about grief and guilt, starring an appropriately confused-looking George Clooney.
The result was a ponderous disappointment unless you had paid to see Clooney’s bare bottom.
Thankfully Edinburgh Lyceum’s stage version, which opened this week, is more approachable and immediate, with the smart-pop quality of a vintage episode of Star Trek or the Twilight Zone and the kind of‘ isn’ t that what sit’ starry guest appearance that helped make Doctor Who appointment viewing.
The Lyceum’s show runner David Greig doesn’t only adapt Solaris for the stage, he gives it a thorough reworking, much as he did earlier this year when the Lyceum premiered a musical version of Bill Forsyth’s beloved 1980s movie, Local Hero.
This Solaris has been shortened and sweetened. The main character has been regendered as a woman – because surely women can be highly regarded scientists too – while the alien object of her affection is now a young, apparently guileless man.
Solaris’s plot still sounds outlandish, as most science fiction storylines do.
In an unspecified f uture, psychiatrist Dr Kris Kelvin (Polly Frame) has been sent to a spaceship that is hovering above a mysterious watercovered planet.
NOTHING has been heard from the three researchers who have been observing Solaris, and Kris discovers that one, a former mentor, is dead and the remaining scientists, Dr Snow (Fode Simbo) and Dr Sartorius (Jade Ogugua), are clearly spooked.
Whil e they have been studying Solaris, Solaris has also been studying them by r eading t heir minds and sending them ‘visitors’.
At first, these were inanimate objects that reminded them of life on Earth, but recently they have been receiving l i ving, breathing copies of people from their past.
Perhaps this is a test, suggests their deceased colleague Dr Gibarian (Hugo Weaving) who appears in a series of video diaries, and seems to be toying with audience memories of Weaving’s sleek-suited villain in The Matrix blockbusters by appearing in rumpled dressdown Friday mode.
Kris wakes up to find the latest ‘visitor’ beside her. Ray (Keegan Joyce) is a reproduction of an old boyfriend.
He is sweet, puppy-friendly and lacking any recall of his past, except what’s stored in Kris’s memory.
Gradually, however, he becomes unsettled as he realises the tenuousness of his identity – think what might have happened i f Invasion Of The Body Snatchers went into therapy.
The Lyceum’s spaceship set is sleek but simple, because Greig is more concerned with ideas than hardware, placing the relationship between Kris and Rey centre stage. Just as the spaceship revolves around Solaris, this staging revolves around the irony of human beings trying to communicate with alien life, when they can’t even communicate with each other.
The result is an engrossing parable about memory and identity with an inherent warning – the tried-and-true adage to be careful what you wish for.