They鈥檙e a long way from home 鈥� 7.5 billion kilometres away, give or take. They鈥檙e on a research base clinging to the dark ice of Pluto, waiting to be picked up. They鈥檝e been waiting a long time. It鈥檚 hard to say just how long.
Alistair McDowall has made his name with intelligent theatre that smashes genre clich茅s and reassembles them into a real and bleeding world. His first play, , saw a working time machine become the centre of a grubby street-gang squabble in a run-down Middlesbrough flat. 听told听the story of a depressed, divorced father who might just be a superhero. The 2014 smash hit took on sex trafficking, applying a hint of Lovecraftian horror to its portrayal of virulent misogyny.
, which opened at London鈥檚 Royal Court Theatre on 30 March, is McDowall鈥檚 most ambitious work yet. It is a deeply human story of life and loss played out across unthinkable distances, and raises harrowing questions about the limits of cognition and the structural weaknesses of the human mind.
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At its simplest, X is a glorious tribute to sci-fi-horror cinema. Its vision of space travel as menial and workaday echoes Ridley Scott鈥檚 Alien, its haunted-house beats call to mind the underrated Event Horizon, and its mind-bending sleight-of-hand narrative hints at Solaris and, more recently, Moon.
There are nods to Nigel Kneale鈥檚 Quatermass, countless dystopian dramas and more than a few episodes of Doctor Who. But where X succeeds is in its ability to structure these well-worn influences into a very different kind of story. And in doing so, it brings our airier science-fiction fantasies down to Earth with a sickening, gut-punching thump.
Mysterious events
Strange things are afoot on the Pluto base. A figure has been seen in the shadows outside the darkened porthole, and the large glowing clock in the centre of Merle Hensel鈥檚 dirty-white set glitches and skips when it鈥檚 not being watched.
Days are stretching into weeks as the cold dwarf planet takes lazy orbits around its dim sun. The life-support systems could keep running forever, but the crew is beginning to fail. Carefree crew-member Mattie is maintaining a sense of routine through regular masturbation, but the tense second-in-command Gilda, played with a brittle intensity by Jessica Raine, is buckling under the strain.
The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant theorised that time, like space, was a priori: it exists independent of our perception of it. But in an unknowably hostile environment scrubbed clean of external reference points, Kant鈥檚 assurances ring decidedly hollow. It鈥檚 eternity in here. You could go mad.
One of the play鈥檚 recurrent themes is that mathematics 鈥� and algebra in particular 鈥� is not really our friend. Maths can be unearthed from ancient civilisations, as hard and undeniable as a splinter of pottery. That is what makes it sacred. It is also precisely what makes maths horrible: it goes where we 肠补苍鈥檛. It handles centuries as easily as it handles hours, and navigates between planets as easily as it crosses oceans.
And we 肠补苍鈥檛. We are physical beings who operate at a certain scale. Our smallness in a very big universe is truly an a priori condition: it is not up for negotiation. We have ambitions, of course. Looking to space for our next adventure, we鈥檙e already beginning to think of ourselves as explorers on those terms. And as we press on with that impossible dream, our defeats can only become more evident, and more tragic.
Time and decay are at the centre of X. These astronauts are a lot like office workers, watching the clock as it refuses to budge and steals their days, steals their time away from their lovers and children until the best of it has run out entirely.
What is X?
The letter X stands for many things in McDowall鈥檚 play. It is time, in the equations nervous metrologist Cole uses to keep a grip on reality. It is part of the chromosomal inheritance we pass on to the next generation. It is the crossing out of dying neurons in a degenerating brain. Its equivalence is what makes it so frightening. As things begin to fall apart in the hallucinatory second act, it creeps meme-like into language itself, erasing as it goes: 鈥淴 X X X X.鈥�
Huge numbers, vast distances, logarithmic multiplication and replication are our enemies, hiding inside us. They are not part of us, and they have nothing to do with how a human consciousness actually navigates time and space. They are the Outside, worming its way in. Our attempts to tame them seem like nothing but wordplay against the death of synaptic networks as dementia bites, or the replication of cancer cells twist vine-like around our bones.
This consistently witty, fleet-footed and thematically formidable play has been given a piano-wire-taut production from the Royal Court鈥檚 artistic director, Vicky Featherstone. Like all of McDowall鈥檚 work, it functions incredibly well on the level of pure, theatrically audacious genre entertainment, but has plenty to say about the world too.
It broods on parenthood and inheritance, on labour and dehumanisation. It鈥檚 out of this world, and at the same time couldn鈥檛 be more precisely focused. Carl Sagan鈥檚 鈥減ale blue dot鈥� is seen all the clearer from the cold, dark distance of this Pluto.
X by Alistair McDowall runs until 7 May at the Royal Court Theatre, London
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