"The Sci-Fi Show". Burton Taylor Studio

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

It takes about thirty seconds to figure out what The Sci-Fi Show is about. And when it hits you, you realise you’re in for an enjoyable, galaxy-spanning ride.

‘John B. Stevens’ is a TV showrunner who found fame and fortune by rebooting the long-running sci-fi show Professor Where (have you got it yet?) But after four seasons he wants out. Constant battles with exterminating ‘Garlics’, resorting to the Professor’s standby props like the ‘sonic wrench’, and realising that the Professor’s predilections for invariably 19-year-old ‘companions’ are a bit weird has left John a disillusioned mess. This is the premise for a show that takes us from back-biting BBC production meetings to John travelling with the Professor himself aboard the Space Hopping Interplanetary Temporal Engine (or SHITE).

As an Oxford student myself from 1982 to 1985 I acted in a couple of plays with Russell T. Davies, and we both found ourselves at Granada TV a few years later. After that our careers, ahem, diverged somewhat. But Russell was one of the kindest, brightest and most effervescent individuals I met as an undergraduate, and to see him fictionalised on the very stage where we worked together nearly forty years ago was in itself a time-twisting, brain-spinning experience worthy of The Doctor. I found myself wondering whether I, myself, had been one of those short-lived ‘companions’ on the TARDIS of Russell’s own career, or maybe no more than a low-paid extra in an Ood costume. But I digress.

You’ll be glad to learn that The Sci-Fi Show does not set out to be great art, or even great theatre. It is, in every way, a bit of fun. And nobody, least of all the cast, takes it seriously. At one point, when somebody forgot their lines, they all dissolved in giggles. At another, Stevens angrily threw his notebook away and it accidentally hit someone sitting in the front row, leading to a quick but profuse apology. The set has even more tatty-looking cardboard on it than the real first season of Dr Who. And the acting and singing are all done with the focus firmly on having a go rather than planning a career in The Theatre.

But – like the Doctor himself – this show has two hearts, and both of them are warm and beating. The first is that it’s written with love. Author Cassie Wicks obviously grew up as a true Whovian, and she’s written a piece of fan-theatre that blows a jaunty raspberry at the show, its makers and its watchers. The second is that, towards the end, the humble office trainee Jules gets her Professor Where script approved, and Stevens asks her to work with him on the next season. Out of nowhere it turns into a classic backstage musical. She’s going out there a script assistant, but she’s got to come back a star.

Other highlights include the Professor himself (no programme, so I can’t tell you who the actor was). He was a combination of The Doctor and Rick from Rick and Morty, a lanky nerd who was living the dream. There was a hilarious parody of Chicago with a number called The Ex-Companions Cell Block Tango. And there was even one original song, Stuck in Time, which packed a real emotional punch.

This is not to say The Sci-Fi Show is a great night at the theatre. It is a bit mumbly, it goes on way too long at two hours, and it would probably be better without most of the songs. But it is a joyous and loving kick in the ribs for Dr Who, and with Russell T. Davies about to make a comeback in the forthcoming season, it even has contemporary relevance. Enjoy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Titus Andronicus". Jesus College Shakespeare Project

Image
Titus Andronicus is a famously violent play, and the warning notice outside the auditorium in Jesus College reads: ‘PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THE PLAY CONTAINS BRUTAL DEPICTION OF R*PE AND MUTILATION AND ITS AFTERMATH, FREQUENT RACIST SLURS, SCENES OF MURDER, ASSAULT, SEXUAL COERCION, DISTRESSING DEPICTIONS OF CORPORAL AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT, HUMAN SACRIFICE, GRIEF, DEATHS (INCLUDING THOSE OF CHILDREN AND ATTEMPTED INFANTICIDE), MENTAL ILLNESS, CANNIBALISM, VOMITING, WEAPONS AND SUDDEN LOUD NOISES.’ You’d think that would be enough, but they forgot to mention cruelty to animals, with one of the most famous scenes in the play revolving around the death by stabbing of a fly. Some productions literally wallow in blood. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s most recent outing went so far as employing a magic consultant so that they could convincingly depict Titus having his own hand cut off in full view of the audience. It makes for great spectacle, but one of the challenges facing any production of
Read more

"Daddy Longlegs". Pilch. Review by Sam Wagman

Image
How is it that we touch the sublime? Our half-baked understanding of mortality and holiness prohibits us from any meaningful engagement or co-existence with it. We are condemned, eternally, to brief grazes with transcendence; a song lyric, a lookout-point, or, indeed, a play. This week, the Michael Pilch Studio has been the centre of a theatrical reckoning of biblical proportions. Stepping out, after the lights went up, into the heavy rain of Saturday night felt akin to phasing out of an encounter with the divine – Matchbox Productions’ Daddy Longlegs is a true triumph. This show represents the pinnacle of Oxford theatre; daring, bold, and engaged. A production scraping the cosmos that lands its audience, with a humbling thump, back in a world riddled with the same broken people that fill its stage. It’s simply magnificent . Following an anonymized priest’s (Will Shackleton) vicarious interactions through the netting of a confession box and the taped-up edges of a glory hole, Daddy Lon
Read more

"King John". Jesus College Shakespeare Project.

Image
If Shakespeare’s works were a huge mansion, and each play a room in it, Romeo and Juliet might be the Grand Ballroom, Hamlet the Old Library, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream the Parkland Walk on a warm, Trinity-term evening. King John would be somewhere in the East Wing. No one goes there very often. It’s dark and unfamiliar, and it smells of death. It's not often opened up nowadays. But on the basis of tonight's show, it undoubtedly should be. The Jesus College Shakespeare Project reveals King John to be not just a thrilling watch, replete with betrayal, murder, battles and unexpected twists, but also stylistically and thematically in step with our own cynical age. The Victorians loved this play (but then, they loved going to freak shows and subjugating entire foreign nations too, so they didn't always get it right). It was so popular at the end of the 19th Century that in 1899 it became the first Shakespeare play to be made into a film - silent, four minutes long, and
Read more