It’s hard to know if the creative team behind this wildly misguided immersive theatre adaptation of Douglas Adams’s satirical sci-fi classic loves the source material too much or not at all.
On the one hand, its incorporation of elements of the less well-known book So Long and Thanks for all the Fish suggest a deeper familiarity with the novel series and a desire to not simply do a straight retelling of the OG Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which has been famously already done via radio, novel, video game, TV series, film and various cult theatre shows (albeit none of this very recently).
On the other hand, it seems to have been made by people who don’t get Adams’ humour, characters or why people like the first book, and uses the romance plot from So Long… to create a far more saccharine story than Adams himself did. The writer and co-creator is one Arvind Ethan David, a former Adams protege. So I assume he’s a fan. But this play hardly makes a case for his mentor’s brilliance.
It begins (mostly) harmlessly enough. The first scene is set in the pub which – in the Adams telling – hapless Englishman Arthur Dent is dragged to by his eccentric friend Ford Prefect, on a very specific mission to drink six pints of bitter ahead of ‘hitchhiking’ aboard a spaceship belonging to the Vogons, the incredibly tedious alien race about to blow Earth up to build a galactic bypass.
This all gets a bit immersive theatre’d up. There are novelty cocktails. There is audience interaction. We are vaguely incorporated into the story: Arthur is no longer the sole human to be rescued from Earth’s demise but we’re invited along too. The really big change is the introduction of Fenchurch, Arthur’s love interest from So Long… Here Arthur has in fact come to the pub for a date with her – not to meet Ford. Intent on spiriting Arthur away, Ford engages Fenchurch in a karaoke battle which is… whatever, these things happen in immersive theatre. But that’s about the show’s last moment of coherency.
Instead of stowing away aboard the Vogon ship, we somehow end up on two-headed rascal Zaphod Beeblebrox’s experimental craft The Heart of Gold. Briefly. Then we end up on the Vogon ship anyway, for reasons that eluded me, in a free-roaming section that encourages us to interact with a selection of tertiary characters from the series who are also incomprehensibly on the Vogon ship.
Arthur, inarguably the main character of Adams’ work, is a distant presence through all this, which is bizarre as the actor is physically there, seemingly playing a version of Arthur who has lost his memory (I’ve not named the actors as there are two per main role, to allow three performances a night). Arthur’s most developed scene in the mid-section is a bizarre recreation of the first meeting between him and Fenchurch, done in the style of Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter for reasons beyond me. Eventually we end up on the planet of Magrahea (where the book ends) but the book’s revelations about the nature of Earth are waved through as if we were so familiar with them there’s no point and the focus is instead given to Arthur and Fenchurch's relationship. Singing is involved.
I mean… it’s odd. Either the storytelling is totally inept or Georgia Clarke-Day’s production simply assumes we’re all so familiar with the original yarn that we don’t need anything explained and that we’d take no pleasure from hearing Adams’s dialogue. Maybe both!
Marvin the Paranoid Android is just hanging out with us for no obvious reason – there is no explanation of who he is and he has nothing meaningful to do (a shame as he’s a nice enough puppet). There is nary a line from the book said as Adams wrote it. There are a truly bizarre number of earnest singing interludes. The romance between Arthur and Fenchurch is treated like it was the point of the entire series, as opposed to just one book.
Snatches of the original theme tune and some animations in the style of the TV show suggest some intention of fan service. But whether through not enough faith in Adams, or too much faith in the creative team’s ability to ‘update’ his story, this is a meandering mess. More dire than a Vogon poetry recital.
