‘The War of the Worlds’ by physical theatre troupe Rhum & Clay is a pleasingly twisty turny thing: it’s not a stage version of the classic sci-fi; but it’s not not a stage version of the classic sci-fi.
In the beginning, Hamish MacDougall and Julian Spooner’s production – which has a script by Isley Lynn – styles itself as an arch homage to Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast, which famously reimagined HG Wells’s novel about invading Martians as a series of faux news bulletins purporting to cover an alien assault on New Jersey.
The show’s four performers chew corn-cob pipes and ape Welles’s distinct tones as they talk us through the familiar but pleasurable-in-the-telling story of how the broadcast seemingly caused a national panic (in part because the explanatory introduction was missed by listeners turning over from a ventriloquist – !!!! – on another channel). This still-notorious incident marked the apex of radio’s power as a medium.
Just as it seems the whole thing is going to be set 80 years ago, there’s an abrupt shift as we meet Meena (Mona Goodwin), a gauche young Brit. She stumbles across an interesting story about a recently deceased American lady who apparently became estranged from her family due to the broadcast. Meena decides she will go to New Jersey to make a podcast about it.
If you stop and think about it too hard, it’s a pretty silly story. But Rhum & Clay tell it with a stylish lo-fi conviction and committed physicality that really sells it. And besides, it’s apparent the story is more of a parable. Without going spoilerishly into it, it’s a show about how false narratives – fake news, if you must – become history, become culture.
Despite a great valedictory speech from Welles and a deftly negotiated wrapping up of the present-day plot, ‘The War of the Worlds’ does feel a bit like it’s fumbling for a killer closing point it doesn’t quite make. A late sequence reimagining the broadcast in contemporary Britain feels weirdly superfluous. And the elephant (Martian?) in the room is that there is evidence that the panic over the broadcast was itself fake news – it’s weird that the show never seriously grapples with this, unless the whole thing is so dementedly meta that it’s implicit.
But as a smartly ambivalent homage to the golden age of the radio and the part myths play in our lives, it’s a winner.