“the plots take just enough unexpected leaps into comic hyperspace that the show is never dull”
Starship Improvise is the perfect piece for fans of classic sci-fi franchises like Star Trek, and the fan conventions that sprang up in their wake. As we all remember, Galaxy Quest was the movie that made fun of both. Starship Improvise will remind audiences of Galaxy Quest, with the add-ed attraction of a show that allows plenty of room for the cast to improvise around the chosen themes for the evening. Judging by the line that waited on the afternoon I was there, actors from the Mischief, Austentatious and Showstopper! companies have found another winner to present as part of their comedy franchise at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. What’s cool about Starship Improvise is that you can just see one show, or you can keep showing up for them all. There’ll be a different episode to improv every time, and a changing cast as well.
The set up in Starship Improvise is as follows: the actors of the popular sci-fi series of Celestia Seven are attending a fan convention. The cast file on stage, talk a bit about the series, what it means to them, and what was really going on behind the scenes. They decide they are going to select a favourite episode, and replay it for the fans. On this particular day, the chosen Celestia Seven episode is all about the Captain’s Birthday. The opening location is the Engine Room, and the emotional theme is Joy. With the parameters set for the improvisations, the cast gets to work. The members of the crew are an obvious mash up of various incarnations of Star Trek, with the tough but emotionally vulnerable captain, the overly logical ship’s surgeon whom she has recently broken up with; the ship’s empath, and of course, the resident alien, who runs around trying to understand humans. In place of the Spock character from Star Trek, however, we have Lab Rador from Canis Major in Celestia Seven.
As the improv gets going, there are lots of opportunities for Starship Improvise to make fun of everything from toxic masculinity to vegetable metaphors. Hmm. Not everything has to make sense, and the audience gets a huge amount of enjoyment from watching the actors miss their cues, mess up their motivations, or just run into a problematic plot line that they can’t get out of. There are moments when we see the tensions between cast members in Celestia Seven spill out into Starship Improvise. It’s all part of the fun, but it’s tough on Method Actors, for some reason.
Co-creator Adam Megiddo (who also plays Lab Rador), and fellow actors Dave Hearn, Ruth Bratt, Charlotte Gittins, Henry Lewis and Henry Shields wing it for every show. They have a list of characters and their various (complicated) relationships both on and off the stage in their heads, and they take it from there. They obviously relish the “act by the seat of your pants” set up in Starship Improvise. And with reason. They have a bunch of devoted fans in the audience who are quite happy to watch anything they do.
Starship Improvise is an easy and entertaining way to spend an hour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s true that it does rely a little too much on familiar memes and themes. But the plots take just enough unexpected leaps into comic hyperspace that the show is never dull. Sometimes it’s good to just settle back in one’s seat, and enjoy the fun.
Reviewed 7th August 2022
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Andrew Pugsley
For dates and venues for all Fringe shows, click on the image below
“Nightlands is the kind of play you root for, even when it doesn’t quite succeed”
Jack MacGregor’s play Nightlands is an ambitious drama set in 1999, in Svalbard, the land of polar bears—and very few humans. Nightlands switches from the personal to the political and back again in ways that you don’t anticipate. It’s also performed by just two actors, the very talented veteran Matthew Zajac, and an equally talented newcomer, Rebecca Wilkie. But in sixty minutes, there just isn’t enough time to explore all the subjects MacGregor puts on stage for his characters to tackle. Especially when these characters — a tough, no-nonsense young woman named Slava and the morose, antisocial, much older Sasha — have brought more than enough of their own baggage up to the Arctic Circle. But Nightlands is proof enough that the Scottish Highlands company Dogstar, based in the Inverness area, doesn’t shy away from plays that deal with difficult material. MacGregor does provide a programme note about themes in this play. It’s helpful, however, if audiences have some knowledge of where the world has been drifting since 1999, when Vladimir Putin came to power in the former Soviet Union. There are scattered references here and there in Nightlands, but they are not really sufficient to get a firm footing on this complex subject matter.
Nightlands opens with two performers telling a story. They constantly interrupt each other, as they set the scene, and fill in the details. She is playing the character of Slava from Chelubinsk. Slava has been assigned to work, alone, in one of the most remote spots in the world. To ensure that Svalbard remains part of a demilitarized zone. The performer who plays Sasha, a character who speaks five languages, is writing a memoir, and is from somewhere south of Moscow — shouldn’t even be there. Yet somehow, he is. This switching back and forth is playwright MacGregor’s way of showing how we rely on memory to establish character and place. And Slava and Sasha also dance around the subject of memory—sometimes literally—as they try to establish physical territory in their isolated location. Both have reasons for wanting to live alone. Both are running from past lives in the former Soviet Union. Neither wants the other to be there, but outside is only the Arctic wasteland, populated by polar bears. The drama is slow moving, and the facts that emerge are ambiguous. It takes a while to see where Nightlands might be going. Other than the bears, the threat to the characters is underplayed, for all the remoteness of their situation.
Nevertheless, MacGregor has created something rather unusual. In Nightlands, he avoids the usual pitfalls of “relationship” dramas by establishing that Slava and Sasha are not going to be romantically involved. At least one character is an unreliable narrator, and there are hints that unreliable memories are at play here as well. Intriguing stuff. But ultimately, it doesn’t add up to a fully satisfying evening, despite the performance skills of Wilkie and Sajac. It may be that sixty minutes is simply not enough time to get to grips with the story. Or that two characters trapped in a room together, can only conjure a limited picture of a decaying Communist state, and the dangerous politics developing thousands of miles away. It’s a brave attempt by MacGregor to write a “big” play (he directs as well), but Nightlands is a bit short of resources. Rather like its two characters in Svalbard.
Nightlands is the kind of play you root for, even when it doesn’t quite succeed. And it’s good to see a theatre company like Dogstar, encouraging playwrights to take a chance on telling a different kind of story for the stage.
Reviewed 6th August 2022
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Paul Campbell
For dates and venues for all Fringe shows, click on the image below
