Houston, we have a fascinating new spin on the nail-biting tale of Apollo 13
Astronaut Fred Haise is re-imagined as an African-American with an axe to grind
Apollo 13: The Dark Side of the Moon Original Theatre (online)
As names for commercial touring companies go, “The Original Theatre Company” is a poor one – so brazen as to suggest the antithesis of originality. But pre-pandemic it staged robust, smart middle-scale work of a sort that might get sniffed at by those of a progressive bent but usually did the business in terms of enticing audiences – most notably Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong (adapted, and tremendous).
Now comes a new play by Torben Betts. Revisiting the abortive, nearfatal Nasa mission of 1970, 50 years on, Apollo 13 boasts strong acting across the board and mesmerising, at times out-of-this-world, visuals.
The story of how the intended third manned lunar landing never happened – the crew instead forced to sweat it out amid a nail-biting frenzy of swift calculations and dwindling oxygen – might be thought old news; it got a good airing too in 1995, thanks to the Ron Howard film.
“Original” might, then, be accused of aiming for a clear and conventional thematic trajectory: as with the trenches of Birdsong, masculine valour tested in extremis. Yet not only does this project affirm a good nose for adrenal storytelling, in both cases the subject is so immense as to transcend male-centricity and embrace instead the human condition: a generational agony in the mud of the Somme, a striving for something higher amid the tussle of the Cold War.
Using transcripts as a launch-pad for his fiction, Betts’s account (with Alastair Whatley and Charlotte Peters co-directing) takes due interest in the mechanics of what happened when, from lift-off to splash down, compressing five days of diligence and dread into 70 minutes. Assisted by a cinematic musical score, with intense close-up camerawork and a sense of live-feed blips, he recaptures a mood of suspense even though we know the happy outcome; indeed, he frames the re-enactment via a modern-day interview with the two surviving members of the three-strong crew: Jim Lovell, who commanded, and Fred Haise (the third man, Jack Swigert, died in 1982).
The big spin put on the astronautical adventure is to insinuate Haise as African-american (two fine black actors, Michael Salami and Geoff Aymer, play his younger and older incarnations) with an axe to grind midvoyage, about race relations and the legacy of slavery. It’s an audacious – even outrageous – rewriting of history but, at a stroke, it turns this theatrefilm hybrid into a play of ideas.
Parallels are certainly hammered home: Salami’s Haise and Tom Chambers’s complacent Swigert trade verbal blows about the US and the value or otherwise of protest riots, with Christopher Harper’s levelheaded Lovell (played in age, with matching emotional understatement, by Philip Franks) looking on. But the core provocation – how little far US society had come then (in terms of equality), and has come since (ditto), despite strides in technology – lingers after you’ve logged off. And if the vintage clips, head-spinning shots of Earth and nifty green-screen work don’t rekindle your wonder at space exploration, I don’t know what will.
At £20, it comes at a price, but it’s a small one to pay for a quick trip ad astra.