“There is a sixth dimension beyond that
which is known to Man… This is the dimension of imagination” –
doodoodoodoo, doodoodoodoo… Rod Serling’s 1959-64 anthology TV series
The Twilight Zone is often thought
of as a watershed for small-screen science-fiction, but in truth it
included not just SF but the supernatural, the (mildly,
1950s-TV-tolerable) horrific, the blackly humorous and the just
generally unexplained. As Serling’s onscreen monologues and the title
voiceover I quoted back there make clear, the keynote is imagination.
It would seem perfect material for a left-field stage adaptation, then
– especially when the adapter, Anne Washburn, came to wider attention
with
Mr Burns, a play about a
post-apocalyptic society where communities bond by retelling a
particular episode of
The Simpsons.
In that play, Washburn used several different forms to show what kind
of society existed around each particular version of the story. Here,
too, she chops and changes, but this time it’s less successful, because
we already know about the societies in question – the
Eisenhower/Kennedy era and our own – and how the stories fit or don’t
fit with each of those periods, or the two with each other.
In short, the play has to do a lot more heavy lifting, but it’s styled
in a way that actually achieves much less. Washburn has taken eight
episodes from the series and not so much interwoven them as stirred
bigger and smaller chunks of them together with “meta” sequences.
Scenes are changed by figures dressed in greatcoats blending with the
starscape backdrop design and also in flying helmets and goggles, as if
they are our pilots and navigators through the Zone. Now and again they
carry or spin across the stage large roundels bearing images from the
original title sequence: an eye, an op-art pattern, a door.
Periodically one of the ten actors delivers part of a Serling
piece-to-camera, always interrupted or distracted just as they get to
the words “...the Twilight Zone”.
Washburn and director Richard Jones are trying to have their cake and
eat it… Well, at least that’s a familiar attitude in 2017 Britain, but
so is the realisation that it can’t actually be done. You can’t be
eerie and lampoon eeriness at the same time, nor mix dated Fifties
preoccupations like “duck and cover” nuclear-war paranoia with clunking
updates such as a reference to “driving while black”. You can’t, I
guess, mix the Twilight and the limelight: the cracks end up showing.
Unlike the parallel dimension in one of the stories, this is not a Zone
that intersects with our own world. It raises smiles and chuckles at
its quaintness, but no chills or deeper thoughts.
Written for The Lady.