Leaving Planet Earth

A generous audience can believe anything. The International Climbing Arena in Newbridge is a grand complex of glass and concrete, so huge and shiny it could pass for a space station on a virgin planet. At first, our coachload of ticketholders are content to accept that we are emigrants from a dying Earth, traversing hyperspace to colonise a new world, even as the yeasty smell of the Caledonian Brewery fills the coach.

But this indulgent, witless, expensive show exhausts the audience's generosity long before the end.

The script, cribbed from better sci-fi, manages only feeble gestures at the “epic questions” promised in the blurb. Most of our time we spend shuffling interminably between nondescript function rooms, fantasising about getting the bus back to Old Earth. After three hours, the play ends in the cavernous climbing hall, a space of tremendous promise, with a son et lumière that's less interstellar transcendence, more shit rave.

Challenged to deliver an immersive experience to a big crowd, Grid Iron Theatre Company make a fatal compromise. Half the time the play sticks to the conceit: we're new arrivals being given a tour of the centre where we will stay as we recover from our journey. But then, without warning, a fourth wall is erected: two characters appear and start chatting as though we're not there, advancing an underdeveloped plot about the mental breakdown of the mission's leader.

If the aim was to smother dramatic tension and prohibit the suspension of disbelief, mission accomplished.