What makes a sensible audience member mouth "I believe in life after love" in a public auditorium? Good comedy.
Steven Canny and John Nicholson’s ‘adaptation’ of H G Wells’s The Time Machine is just that, as it throws in time-worn tactics of the genre to dupe an audience into having fun. The show is a real conceit as it fast becomes apparent that the ‘subplot’ of three emerging actors putting on a poorly resourced show is the story that we stick with. By surrendering to this, and the battery of theatre in-jokes that it come with it, the play achieves its agenda. In Director, Orla O Loughlin’s words: "it laughs in the face of despair", not only because of its pandemic origins but because of the heightened climate of anxiety it has landed in this year.
Performers Dave, Amy and Michael are friends, and it is this character-driven dynamic that carries the loose narrative through its massive themes—that and Wells’s grandson Dave bringing his granddad's Time Machine to rehearsals. This creates a reality where the trio repeat multiple renditions of the same morning, and ultimately the angst of Michael’s life hanging in balance.
Much hilarity is derived from status-play, in which the humble character who faces an abstract but certain death is overlooked, ignored and casually abused by the rizz of Dave Wells and the gusto of actor, and Cher tribute-act, Amy. That is until, they improvise giving Michael this ideal last hour on Earth.
Involving the audience in Michael’s final wishes, a dinner-date with an unwitting man in Row A:
Dave: (to man’s partner) "Don’t worry, you can watch!"
…and a portrait session with an audience-volunteer, pushes the piece in to a thorough celebration of the comedic arsenal. Throughout the evening, we have moved from culturally on-point jokes to pastiche of genre—The Importance of Being Ernest rap-mash-up—to nudging the audience into supporting roles on-stage.
While the trio’s actorly ego’s tread and fall all over each other, we are also treated to successful moments of sympathy. While enacting H G’s book, Amy and Dave present the sequence in which Wells’s character returns from travelling across time and space to find the love of his life has married his best friend and lived out several decades with her alternative family… In what Michael believes are his final moments, he delivers a soliloquy from Hamlet that showcases his vulnerabilities and desire for meaning.
Those wishing for an evening of literary satire will be disappointed, as this is not potted H G Wells, but rather the potted concepts of H G Wells on speed. However, it is well pitched for the ‘theatre audience’ it references, against the voguish backdrop of a giant clock-monument and exposed back-wall of the Park Theatre.
Michael Dylan, Amy Revelle and Dave Hearn do not disappoint in holding together this iteration of Goes Wrong humour mixed with sitcom nuances. Allusions to contemporary figures of speech abound: time waits for no one, better late than never, a stitch in time saves nine, FOMO… if I could turn back time… but can you? Yes—the run lasts until 30 December.