, Almeida Theatre, London, to 27 January
The last time London saw a play by award-winning US writer Anne Washburn it was Mr Burns 鈥� a journey into a post-apocalyptic future, where the remnants of human civilisation clung to half-remembered fragments of The Simpsons. 聽Fitting, then, that she should return to skewer the strange times we live in through the hallucinatory lens of The Twilight Zone.
Rod Serling鈥檚 genre-defying anthology series was first broadcast in 1959, in an America haunted by the Cold War, a world of reds beneath the bed where the threat of strange objects in the night sky wasn鈥檛 confined to alien visitors.
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Here, Washburn selects eight out of the 150-plus episodes in the original series, and weaves them into a narrative that鈥檚 part larky pastiche, part dire warning about the slippage of cultural memory, the rise of fake news and global paranoia.
Rather than selecting a grab bag of greatest hits, the episodes Washburn has chosen are bound by unsettling trends which ran, almost unnoticeable, through the series. People go missing, are mistaken for enemies, turn on one another and forget their own identity. There are no gremlins on the wing of aeroplanes (as in the famous 鈥淣ightmare at 20,000 Feet鈥� episode), no cook book on how 鈥淭o Serve Man鈥�, stories which have been lampooned so often, including by The Simpsons, that to retread them would be pointless.
In their place, for example 鈥淣ightmare As A Child鈥�, the story of an impossible little girl with a disturbing premonition, 聽鈥淎nd When The Sky Was Opened鈥�, where three hero astronauts who survive a deadly crash simply wink out of existence one by one. Best of all is 鈥淭he Shelter鈥�, which Washburn has expanded from its simple premise into a culture war of simmering racial and class tension.
Ghost of an era
Collaged together, the stories reflect on one another, as motifs and images return in new and peculiar shapes. It should be a tumult, a nonsense, but somehow the power of Serling鈥檚 storytelling is never diminished: each story as crisp as when it was first broadcast.
It鈥檚 also a surprisingly effective match for Washburn鈥檚 own dramatic universe. She returns to ghosts again and again in her work, whether it鈥檚 the phantom of a long-lost 鈥淪ideshow Bob鈥� episode, or the visitor who haunts her recent Antlia Pneumatica, but here it鈥檚 like the ghost of an entire era, returned to warn a new A-bomb-happy age of the deadly perils of nuclear escalation.
Where the message may be bleak, however, the tone is often buoyant, gently mocking the conventions of the original series. There are some brilliant segments that rib-poke Serling鈥檚 starched on-camera narration, and a recurring visual gag with cigarettes magically produced through sleight-of-hand that鈥檚 both a neat reminder of the ubiquity of fags on the show itself, and another reminder that nothing is quite what it seems, and memory and reality are constantly vulnerable to fracture.
Performances are also modelled on the slight all-American stiffness of the 50鈥檚 series, which gives the entire production a distinctly unreal and dream-like quality. Much less effective are some of director Richard Jones鈥� other creative choices, with a set by Paul Steinberg that feels fake in all the wrong ways, and a bizarrely flat lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin. Fortunately sound by Christopher Shutt is an absolute stand-out, as weird voices echo and emerge from every corner of the auditorium.
Minor flaws aide, this is a remarkable production. A journey into the imagination that鈥檚 at once a celebration of man鈥檚 imaginative powers, and a portent of doom for a world increasingly incapable of separating fact from fiction.
