For a piece which aims to be a
celebration and an exhortation, from a company whose keynote is an
awareness of science’s integral role in our culture,
Pioneer is puzzlingly unfocused in
both form and content. The story of Earth’s second private-enterprise
mission to Mars
circa 2030
weaves together events at mission control, on the red planet itself
where the previous mission appears to be unravelling, and on the road
in Siberia where a pair of brothers are taking a road trip to various
locations of significance in the 20th-century space race.
Jack Lowe’s production for curious directive [
sic] is thoughtful, fluidly staged
and inventive in its use of both physical and multimedia resources
(thanks to Cecilia Carey’s set and Jasmine Robertson’s video design);
one can see how the company have come to be described as a low-budget
(which does not mean shoddy) version of Complicité. It is the
crystallising of ideas into a coherent, dynamic whole that lets them
down.
The gradual decline into hallucination and paranoia of Martian
resident Imke (Flora Denman) ought to be compellingly poignant; the
imperatives driving Shari and Rudi (Avita Jay and Dudley Rees) to keep
the project on track at mission control ought to be suspenseful; the
journey of Ivan and Alyosha (Jesse Briton and James Hardy) should
provide a viewpoint with which we can identify. Instead, the brothers
obsessively recount potted histories of the Soviet space programme
which they obviously know already but need to be imparted to us, as if
Dan Brown had taken to science fiction; Imke lies around and mumbles,
which may explain why she has never noticed key facts of physics that
would reveal the
Capricorn One-type
secret shared by those at control. Nor, despite numerous references to
the disappearance of Imke’s husband Oskar, are we given any idea why he
has vanished.
Lowe and company seem on the one hand to take the wonders of science
for granted and on the other to need to spell out minutiae for us. The
result is stodgy at both ends without being firm in the middle. In
space, no-one can hear you shrug.
Written for the Financial
Times.