Dystopia in the Dining Room: The Machine Stops.
Today I did audience participation in my own home. This must be what its like owning a Peloton, but instead of a roid-raging lunatic screaming at me in Lycra, I enjoyed the denizens of an alternative Edwardian age storming against a tyrannical regime with rather more success than we appear to be doing at the moment.
E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, is an absurdly on-the-nose sci fi fantasy from the author of "Howard's End". It presents a future society living remotely from one another and in contact by means of the Machine. They are unable to go outside as "the surface of the earth is just dust and mud" and besides you need an "eggression permit" from the Central Committee.
To call this tale timely is to state the bleedin' obvious. To present it as a theatrical production through the medium of Zoom, as Big Telly Theatre have done is a stunningly neat answer to a near intractable problem: how do you do theatre in a lock down? This is a remarkably clever solution.
I'm a big fan of the Out of the Unknown 1960's dramatisation of The Machine Stops, which features Peter Gothard suffering poetically in a hive made of egg-boxes. Everything is white as white is the colour of the future, as if the whole world was destined to be a 90's hip hop video (though to be fair in the 90's it often was). Big Telly, brilliantly, present the world of The Machine as Forster's own world - a diseased Edwardian age, full of wood-panelling, curling moustaches and framed portraits of dirigibles. When people speak to one another it is into haunted shower heads. The Operator (an excellent Nicky Harley) lives behind a wire mesh and is desperate to tame the Heath Robinson tangle the Machine presents: it is all dusty valves and cracking Bakelite and the world is beautifully realised. Shot using green-screen there is the occasional bleed into clothing that lends the production an 80's video feeling - the looseness of unmoored floors that presented themselves in TV shows like "Luna" or, inevitably old skool Who. There was also a gentle echo of Peter Greenaway's "A TV Dante", with its endlessly shifting overlays and format tinkering.
The story sees Kuno, (Gary Crossan) an angry young man denied reproduction rights as he might produce a "baby of undue strength". He wrestles with the strictures of the world of the Machine and dreams of escape. His mother Vashti (Anna Healy) is entirely at peace with the Machine, content to give her lectures full of "second hand ideas". They live at opposite sides of the world and Kuno begs his mother to visit him, something she is loathe to do but reluctantly agrees when he blocks her on-line (how prescient). When she arrives Kuno shocks her, telling her he has been to the surface and that the Central Committee and by extension The Machine has lied to them. Not only that but he recognises "the signs" and The Machine is breaking down. The Machine will stop.
Into all this Big Telly cram the exciting programming that the Machine provides (hypnotists and magicians loom out at you), the bickering Toffs of the committee (Christina Nelson's "John" a dead-ringer for H G Wells in moustaches and a polka dot bow tie), a rigged election and the relentless hectoring and eventual revolution of The Operator. This is fast paced stuff, hurling ideas at you and its brilliantly realised in straitened circumstances, making full use of a new medium, a fresh idea. If the theatres are shut, if we're stuck at home, if we're staring at screens - like the protagonists of The Machine Stops - then this is an elegant and engaging solution. Real Theatre in a box.
(One thing: the show is in gallery mode. This means that your stupid face is on screen for the entirety of the story. Don't do what I did and do sort your hair out and put on a decent shirt and sit up straight. I spent the entirety of the show wondering why a disgraced Tory politician who was now living in his car had joined the merry throng. But it was me. It was just me. A pillar of gammon with a small silver cat perched on top of it. Took me right out of it a couple of times, I can tell you.)
E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops, is an absurdly on-the-nose sci fi fantasy from the author of "Howard's End". It presents a future society living remotely from one another and in contact by means of the Machine. They are unable to go outside as "the surface of the earth is just dust and mud" and besides you need an "eggression permit" from the Central Committee.
To call this tale timely is to state the bleedin' obvious. To present it as a theatrical production through the medium of Zoom, as Big Telly Theatre have done is a stunningly neat answer to a near intractable problem: how do you do theatre in a lock down? This is a remarkably clever solution.
I'm a big fan of the Out of the Unknown 1960's dramatisation of The Machine Stops, which features Peter Gothard suffering poetically in a hive made of egg-boxes. Everything is white as white is the colour of the future, as if the whole world was destined to be a 90's hip hop video (though to be fair in the 90's it often was). Big Telly, brilliantly, present the world of The Machine as Forster's own world - a diseased Edwardian age, full of wood-panelling, curling moustaches and framed portraits of dirigibles. When people speak to one another it is into haunted shower heads. The Operator (an excellent Nicky Harley) lives behind a wire mesh and is desperate to tame the Heath Robinson tangle the Machine presents: it is all dusty valves and cracking Bakelite and the world is beautifully realised. Shot using green-screen there is the occasional bleed into clothing that lends the production an 80's video feeling - the looseness of unmoored floors that presented themselves in TV shows like "Luna" or, inevitably old skool Who. There was also a gentle echo of Peter Greenaway's "A TV Dante", with its endlessly shifting overlays and format tinkering.
The story sees Kuno, (Gary Crossan) an angry young man denied reproduction rights as he might produce a "baby of undue strength". He wrestles with the strictures of the world of the Machine and dreams of escape. His mother Vashti (Anna Healy) is entirely at peace with the Machine, content to give her lectures full of "second hand ideas". They live at opposite sides of the world and Kuno begs his mother to visit him, something she is loathe to do but reluctantly agrees when he blocks her on-line (how prescient). When she arrives Kuno shocks her, telling her he has been to the surface and that the Central Committee and by extension The Machine has lied to them. Not only that but he recognises "the signs" and The Machine is breaking down. The Machine will stop.
Into all this Big Telly cram the exciting programming that the Machine provides (hypnotists and magicians loom out at you), the bickering Toffs of the committee (Christina Nelson's "John" a dead-ringer for H G Wells in moustaches and a polka dot bow tie), a rigged election and the relentless hectoring and eventual revolution of The Operator. This is fast paced stuff, hurling ideas at you and its brilliantly realised in straitened circumstances, making full use of a new medium, a fresh idea. If the theatres are shut, if we're stuck at home, if we're staring at screens - like the protagonists of The Machine Stops - then this is an elegant and engaging solution. Real Theatre in a box.
(One thing: the show is in gallery mode. This means that your stupid face is on screen for the entirety of the story. Don't do what I did and do sort your hair out and put on a decent shirt and sit up straight. I spent the entirety of the show wondering why a disgraced Tory politician who was now living in his car had joined the merry throng. But it was me. It was just me. A pillar of gammon with a small silver cat perched on top of it. Took me right out of it a couple of times, I can tell you.)
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