I imagine that during this lockdown most of us have wanted to escape from our isolation and either return to the past or fly into the future.
Oxford based Creation Theatre Company has anticipated this zeitgeist with its production ‘The Time Machine’, in which writer Jonathan Holloway takes the central notion of time travel from H G Wells’ famous sci-fi novel and applies it to our digital age.
READ ABOUT THE MAKING OF THE TIME MACHINE HERE: http://551.326.mywebsitetransfer.com/let-creation-take-you-in-the-time-machine-to-an-undiscovered-world-where-pandemics-run-rife-and-vaccines-rule-sound-familiar/
The result is a surreal and psychedelic mayhem of sounds and colours, where the fixed chronology of time is subverted by people’s names, faces and clothes changing without warning, as our perceptions of identity shift from under our feet.
Like their recent and equally successful virtual production of ‘The Tempest’, the entertainment is online and interactive, with the audience zoomed in and invited to share ageless objects such as umbrellas, and to dress up in glamorous fancy hats and scarves, as the actors unnervingly break from their narratives to address individual participants on a split screen.
READ TEMPEST REVIEW HERE: http://551.326.mywebsitetransfer.com/review-a-radically-abridged-but-joyously-chaotic-hour-of-fun-and-mayhem-c-o-creation-theatre-companys-new-zoom-production-of-the-tempest-book-now/
Peppered with ‘infinite loops’, ‘illusory truth effects’ and ‘different alternative realities’, the action is hugely energetic throughout, with particular mention to Clare Humphrey as a Time Traveller (like Dr Who, there are more than one of them) and Sarah Edwardson as a contemporary scientist trying to justify our COVID ridden world.
Nice touches include the observation that tourist travel has spread the pandemic, and that the time machine in George Pal’s famous 1960s film was ‘an overblown sun lounger’.
From the outset the Computer warns us about ‘the temporal instability caused by time travel’: the irony, of course, is that if we really had discovered it, someone from the future would now be coming back to correct our errors.
The production is currently running until June 28, and I’d recommend the adventure!
Book here: https://www.creationtheatre.co.uk
Simon Court
