A woman looks up at a destroyed Bucket Fountain sculpture150 years into the future Sarah and Danny meet, fall in love, and get mar­ried in a Wel­ling­ton dev­ast­ated by earth­quakes, cli­mate change, and the effects of a dis­tant nuc­le­ar explo­sion. Then their careers sep­ar­ate them by dis­tance – Danny in Wel­ling­ton work­ing to save the Earth, Sarah on Mars work­ing to cre­ate a new world. They can meet in the Atom Room, a vir­tu­al real­ity space where they can talk, touch and love. Will it be enough for them?

There’s a short preshow VR exper­i­ence from Poly­tronik Stu­di­os which sets the scene for Wel­ling­ton. The land is under­wa­ter and dif­fer­ent to what we know now. People have to wear pro­tect­ive suits. (Keep an eye out for the fly­ing car.) When the open­ing video sequence rolls in the theatre we are already primed for the idea that everything has gone hor­ribly wrong. Out­side has (mostly) become too dan­ger­ous for humans and in a sim­il­ar way we (mostly) see Sarah (Har­riet Preb­ble) and Danny (Taylor Hall) isol­ated from oth­er people. Occa­sion­ally Sarah’s man­ager Mar­garet (Claire Waldron) swoops in, bosses Sarah around then swoops out again. The con­cerns of the char­ac­ters are sim­il­ar to con­cerns now – gender roles, relat­ing to each oth­er via a digit­al medi­um, work, the desire to be part of some­thing big­ger than your­self, fam­ily – with a small amount of tech­nobabble to indic­ate it’s set in the future.

Dir­ect­or Lyn­dee-Jane Ruther­ford deploys the act­ors neatly through the snap­shots we get to see of their lives togeth­er. Preb­ble strikes just the right bal­ance between being in love and excited about a rela­tion­ship as her poten­tially spe­cies sav­ing work. She has won­der­ful moments where her face is par­tic­u­larly anim­ated and we can feel her character’s pas­sion. Hall starts sweet as a slightly bum­bling earth optim­ist which is expressed in his body lan­guage. This changes as the stakes change for his char­ac­ter. Waldron is mar­velous as a self-con­tained tyr­ant with voice and ges­tures rein­for­cing her dis­tance from the oth­ers. A slightly breathy voice later in the show reveals how affected she is.

Set and cos­tume design­er Ian Har­man has taken inspir­a­tion from a num­ber of fash­ion eras res­ult­ing in a design that feels futur­ist­ic yet famil­i­ar. Cos­tumes are light brown, sand col­oured or cream which con­trast the vir­tu­al real­ity neon wire­frame style of the set. AV design­ers Raylene Beals and Johanna Sanders (with video­graphy by Benny Jen­nings and Adam Browne) provide visu­al aug­ment­a­tion. The light­ing design by Jen­nifer Lal works sym­path­et­ic­ally with the pro­jec­tions res­ult­ing in a space that is always visu­ally inter­est­ing. Ori­gin­al music by Ruth Carr, Paul Dodge and Ryan Beehre provides a soundtrack that is eth­er­e­al and affect­ing. I love the design and how it’s used.

I really enjoyed this show* and I hope you go and enjoy it too.

 

* One thing miss­ing from this play for me is the lack of Māori. Come on! Jango Fett is a space Māori and there will be Māori in Wel­ling­ton in 150 years!