The Void

The year is 2160. The world is destroyed and only corporations survive. In The Void, those corporations control what remains of humanity through chips implanted in their subjects, who live at the mercy of a technology they can no longer understand. Sound familiar?

The belly of the Traverse has become a shabby, dishevelled space station, with the screens, video and lighting creating imagery that would feel at home in a retro video game as we beam through space, dodging asteroids and spacecraft alike. The ship's bleeps, scanning sounds, radio, video, lighting, helmets and torches work in remarkable synchronisation. The sound design is a real auditory treat, as we are beamed up beyond our world to a space that is a joy to inhabit. There is something of Red Dwarf and Fallout in the creepy, comic atmosphere, while even the AI-generated imagery works for a change giving an artifice to the production and the uncanny quality it thrives on.

It is a shame, though, that the acting cannot always match what is around it. Alex Moran as Flint is wooden in places, with a grating mix of Northern and American in accent that seems as lost as his ship, while the dialogue leans heavily on swearing without much effect. Appearing at times a parody, the shows awkward stage combat does not assist. Ryan Simons' Blair fares far better as something of a Mengelesque rogue doctor, while both do work to facilitate and embellish the show's numerous and genuinely faultless visual effects. But these cannot make effective theatre on their own.

Meanwhile, The Void gets bogged down in its own lore: the IAC, the miners, Titan’s Cave, Central Command, all set about to create a world with plenty of texture at the risk of alienation, like some of the longer interactions where the stakes fall away to the hope of the next jump scare.

Nova, however, the AI at the centre of the piece, gives the machinery a more unsettling purpose. Almost too helpful, she feeds Flint and Blair their own questions, fears and desires. While no HAL 9000, Kubrick's influence here is hard to miss. The scarier thing about Nova is her allegiance to nothing beyond herself. “Who’s in charge?” is the question the show turns back on us.

For all its sci-fi trappings, The Void keeps pulling this distant world towards our own. Visually, that job is carried out in spectacular fashion; its theatrical language pulls us clean out of our own world. The frustrating thing is that when the dialogue and acting drag us crashing back to Earth, the machinery has done its job just a little too well.

The Void by Thunder Road Theatre, Watford Palace Theatre. Credit Marc Brenner.