To paraphrase the opening words of H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel: “No one would have believed in the first years of the 21st century that this show was being watched keenly and closely…” and let’s just end it there. Jeff Wayne’s 1978 concept album has since spawned a clutch of new editions and re-recordings, a video game and several tours, although his programme note claims that this is the show’s world première. Perhaps he means it’s the first proper staging, as opposed to concert performances.

However, I’d hardly say it counts. Wayne’s band and string section take up at least half the stage – and the Dominion is not a small theatre – leaving a shallow strip for acting and dancing. Liam Steel’s choreography fails to avoid making it look as if the Martians’ lethal rays make folk cavort themselves to death. (Later Steel has to make the same dancers personify creeping Martian vegetation.) Meanwhile, director Bob Tomson seems to concentrate on getting his actors on and offstage and to look vaguely as if they’re experiencing the emotions in Gary Osborne’s lyrics, secondary though they often are to Wayne’s bombastic AOR score. Three of the four male leads onstage – Michael Praed as the protagonist, Jimmy Nail as the half-mad Parson Nathaniel and David Essex as “the Voice of Humanity” – are in late middle age, yet the first two boast love interests played by women some 30 years their junior. If the performances often seem perfunctory, Nail does enough untrammelled Acting for the lot of them and to spare. Liam Neeson, as an older version of the Journalist-narrator played by Praed, wisely keeps his distance, appearing only on a clumsily flown-in video screen.

Oh, the video. In fact, the tech in general shows little sign of being any younger than the album. The CGI and other video clips seem not so much retro as antique, and are poorly projected into the bargain; the unoriginal idea of having coloured lights flash brightly at the audience was overdone by the half-hour mark; and when the Martian tripod first sidled tentatively onstage in (so to speak) person I was unable to suppress a hearty guffaw. The whole stupefyingly self-regarding affair is almost certainly the worst West End show I have seen in the current decade.

Written for the Financial Times.