HG Wells’s seminal 1898 sci-fi novel is back on the stage, though not on the scale of recent concert tours of Jeff Wayne’s popular musical adaptation. This version is from Imitating the Dog, which has a 28-year track record of staging classic works, from Frankenstein to King Lear and operas such as Tosca, as well as cult films including Night of the Living Dead, often fusing live performance and technology to disarming effect.
The adaptation, created by Pete Brooks, Andrew Quick and Simon Wainwright, the artistic directors of the company, retains the episodic structure of the novel while training a subjective eye on the protagonist, William (played with visceral intensity by Gareth Cassidy), who wakes disorientated from a hospital procedure to find himself in the midst of an apocalyptic alien invasion. His instinct is to try to get to Epsom and the wife, Evie (Amy Dunn), he believes to be alive. This involves fighting his way through a London reduced to rubble by gigantic tripods with ray guns.
Glimpsed newspaper front pages, footage of marches in support of Enoch Powell’s views and extracts from Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech locate the action in the late 1960s or early 1970s, linking 19th-century speculation on extra-terrestrial invasion to present paranoia about rising levels of immigration. Climactic scenes in Dover trace a backwards line from images of migrants crossing the Channel on small boats to colonial oppression, bombing campaigns and genocide in other parts of the world.
Morgan Bailey and Gareth Cassidy
ED WARING
It is a tantalising contemporary riff on Wells’s themes. The production misses its mark, however, in part due to an unhappy marriage of staged and filmed elements. As in previous shows by the company, the cast is required to whirl into place with cameras, framing the action for broadcast on a large screen above the stage. Issues with delays between live action and what we see on screen may warm up as the tour progresses. Certain elements, including a scene in a car, are almost comically misconceived and there is a disconnect between the intensity of the performances and the artificiality of the rear projections that proves increasingly distracting.
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Music and sound design from James Hamilton and Rory Howson augment the atmosphere of unease but the technical clunkiness of the show leaves you longing for the subtle thrills of conventional stagecraft.
★★☆☆☆
120min
Touring to May 2, imitatingthedog.co.uk