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Thanks in no small part to social media-savvy Brit astronaut Tim Peake, space travel has made a return to public imagination. But it’s the Cold War glory days that Idle Motion’s play nods to, specifically the Voyager probe. Launched in 1977, it’s currently 12 billion miles out into space, and carries the ‘Golden Record’: a vinyl cache of human artefacts optimistically intended for the hands/claws/tentacles of aliens.
This is mirrored in the story of ‘Voyager’, which is centred around teacher Carrie’s discovery of a tape recording while sorting through her late mother’s possessions. It reveals she’s the product of a love affair between her a mother and a technician at Nasa during the probe’s launch. At the same time, the space agency announces that it’s recruiting from the general public for a mission to Mars. Unbeknownst to her fiancé, Carrie applies, and makes it from one round to the next, until she’s on her way to California to become an astronaut.
This is more a play about dealing with the legacies of parents, and how bereavement can compel us to do weird and impulsive things, than it is about rockets and alien worlds. Which would be fine – except that in trying to tackle both, the play manages neither sufficiently. Marrying human drama with all this cosmic stuff is certainly a tough gig; Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Interstellar’ worked with a similar parent/child dynamic to compromised results. What’s particularly frustrating is how various moral dilemmas are opened along Carrie’s journey – abandoning your loved ones for the greater good of humankind – without being explored.
The five-strong cast employ some nifty choreography to stitch together the rapid succession of scenes, but there are too many throwaway roles to let anyone except shine except Grace Chapman’s Carrie. She delivers the right balance of strength and vulnerability – but the story’s lack of focus rebounds on her character (whose final decision I found maddening). Idle Motion’s willingness to work with such untheatrical subject matter is to be commended – I only wish they’d set their eyes on the Earth or the stars, and not both.