SHOOT FOR THE MOON
Virtual Apollo 13 astronauts who
Apollo 13: The Dark Side Of The Moon (originaltheatreonline.com)
Verdict: One giant leap for a theatre ★★★★✩ The 39 Steps (Maltings Theatre, St Albans)
Verdict: 39 steps in the right direction ★★★✩✩
HOuSTON, we have a problem.’ It was one small sentence for a man; but one giant hitch for Mission Control when, 50 years ago, the Apollo 13 voyage to the moon was rocked by an explosion.
The story has since been turned into a film starring Tom Hanks, but now it’s being re- told by the extraordinarily enterprising Original Theatre in an online play by Torben Betts.
While other theatre companies shut up shop in the face of Covid, Original Theatre has sought out new frontiers and boldly gone where no troupes have gone before.
The Royal Shakespeare Company, by contrast, this week announced impending redundancies . . . sorry, a consultation process . . . for furloughed staff, before a cautious reopening of their main stage in December.
And the National Theatre, which has also been promised money by the Treasury, will re-open with a single monologue next month: the dispiritingly titled Death Of England.
Apollo 13, though, is Original Theatre’s third online show of the pandemic; selffinanced and filmed largely in actors’ homes and bedrooms. It’s a stunning feat. Charlotte Peters and Alastair Whatley’s direction combines green screen animation with film footage of the launch, the moon and the Earth, to recreate life aboard the wounded module limping through space.
I ntercut with an i magined present-day reunion of surviving astronauts Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, it puts our premier league theatres to shame.
EMPLOYING edited transcripts of conversations with Mission Control for much of the first half, Betts’s script uses the second half to imagine the three men chewing over the issues of the day, as they are re-routed around the moon to conserve oxygen.
So the perfunctory — ‘Houston, do you read?’ and ‘roger that’ — gives way to the gorgeously corny (‘ l ove is all we got to keep us warm!’)
Mercifully, this is not the cue for the boys to get their space suits off, but instead to debate such hot topics as civil rights and the legacy of slavery.
To this end, Haise has been reimagined as an African-American (young Fred is played by Michael Salami; old Fred by Geoff Aymer). He disputes with Right-wing copilot Jack Swiger t ( Tom Chambers), who went on to become a Republican politician; while urbane skipper Jim Lovell (Christopher Harper) keeps the peace. (Philip Franks plays Lovell in later life.)
Their conversation is a little fanciful, and I’m ashamed to say social justice would not be high on my agenda if I was trapped in pitch darkness, freezing cold and a quarter of a million miles from Earth.
Really impressive, though, is Dominic Bilkey’s sound; catching the hiss, crackle and time delay of the radio conversations, as well as the boom of lift-off and ominous rumblings in the spacecraft.
Sophie Cotton’s music adds tense violin to the awe of the organ and rolling kettle drums. I recommend listening with good headphones.
I HAVE also been hugely i mpressed by t he Maltings Theatre, in St Albans, Hertfordshire, which has launched an entire autumn season, starting with Patrick Barlow’s parody of
John Buchan’s novel The 39 Steps. It’s a cheerful romp; with stiffupper-lipped Richard Hannay pursued by cops and spies through the Highlands of the 1930s, after a mysterious woman is murdered in his London flat.
Yes, i t’s sometimes hammy where it should be snappy, but the cast of four enjoy great larks cavorting about t he props cupboard set and milking gags about social distancing.
And as our thoroughly English hero, with pipe clenched between teeth, pencil moustache and Harris Tweed, James Douglas has the highly marketable comic quality of looking a bit like Wallace, without Gromit.