Review: Dark Land Light House, Old Vic

Teller (Jessica Macdonald) is a lighthouse keeper. The lighthouse she tends is a space station circling the Dark Land, a mysterious anomaly in space that draws ships to their destruction. Her lighthouse serves to warn off passing space vessels, and her days are filled with the mundane tasks of maintenance and self-entertainment.

Her only company – after her predecessor Parcival (Derek Frood) has departed – is a chatty computer named Hypatia (Laura Dannequin). Until things start to go wrong – and the airlocks start opening…

It may be that for those thoroughly immersed in the full canon of science fiction, Sleepdogs’ piece is bursting with glittering references that raise a smile of recognition (spot the Event Horizon quote etcetera) and an acknowledgement of their clever interweaving. But for the average punter, Dark Land Light House is a gravity-free tumble of mixed messages, false starts and confusion.

At times, one has a sense that the play could be becoming a sci-fi horror story (like Alien or The Thing), a megacomputer-gone-mad fable (like Dark Star or 2001: A Space Odyssey), or – more interestingly – a meditation on loneliness through the medium of the solitary lighthouse keeper in which the intergalactic setting is merely an interesting backdrop.

But it fulfils none of these promises, with jagged switches of storyline, plot developments that are dangled like red herrings, and a shift soon after the halfway point into sententious incomprehensibility. There are vague prods at topics such as the nature of identity and artificial intelligence, the time-shift effect of travelling at the speed of light, the spread of humanity amongst the stars, and what it must be like to be completely and utterly alone: but none of these are explored, let alone followed through to any sort of satisfactory conclusion.

Understanding is not aided by the fact that vital pieces of dialogue are either delivered in Parcival’s hard-to-follow Scottish dialect or in the stumbling utterings of a two-year-old, nor by the fact that at moments of drama Teller and Hypatia’s crucial lines are drowned out by an over-enthusiastic, over-amplified soundscape. The tone of the script is also disconcertingly inconsistent, with Teller maintaining a line of flippant asides even as she makes the ultimate life and death decision.

It’s rare for a play to contain its own neat summary. But in the clunky epilogue, which seeks to provide an explanation of sorts (albeit both unnecessary and unsatisfactory), the disembodied Voice perfectly sums up Dark Land Light House: “None of it makes much sense, I’m afraid, and you might not like it”.

Dark Land Light House continues at Bristol Old Vic until Saturday, April 30. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/darkland.html