Pioneer, Shoreditch Town Hall, EC1
reviewed for The Times, 17 April 2015
It’s not hard to see why this ambitious tribute to space exploration won a Fringe First award at last year’s Edinburgh Festival. Confidently devised by the Norwich-based ensemble Curious Directive, it’s inventive and visually clever in all the ways the Fringe likes, showcasing low-budget theatre at its most resourceful.
Curious Directive has a track record of communicating sophisticated scientific ideas and drawing in senior scientists to its collective devising process: the cast list credits Dr Lewis Dartnell as astrobiologist to the ensemble. And Pioneer, a web of stories converging on the first settlement on Mars, is an unabashed celebration of exploration for its own sake.
Up on Mars, Imke and her husband Oskar tend their soil samples and test their boundaries, a secret advance party before the first official mission to Mars is broadcast live to the Earth. Imke’s marine biologist sister Maartje explores the ocean depths, careerist Rudi plots his rise through mission control, and the great-grandsons of Sergei Korolev, one of Russia’s greatest space engineers, embark on a vodka-fuelled road trip to trace his legacy.
At least, these are the stories that should ground Pioneer, but underneath all the sparks and gadgets there isn’t much character. There’s a touch of overconfidence to Curious Directive’s intellectual clichés: do we really need a new play to tell us that space exploration could mean retelling Adam and Eve or that films about road trips or space quests all have The Odyssey and The Canterbury Tales standing behind them? The Korolev brothers’ self-indulgent roles as portentous social commentators could dearly have done with an edit.
Yet the ethical twists and turns of the plot — too good to give away here — are enough to keep Pioneer constantly engaging. There’s a wider argument to be had about what happens to the Fringe when successful theatre on a shoestring increasingly becomes theatre with a white-hot technical whizz on your team — live projections and visualisations do a lot of the heavy lifting here — but if Pioneer is the future, we have reason to be optimistic.
