Rod Serling’s anthology series (1959-64) was the first major, sustained TV breakthrough for “genre” work... even if the actual genre can’t be pinned down. Science fiction is there aplenty, but also fantasy, moderate horror, social satire, comedy... the supreme unifying factor is imagination, which – as Serling’s opening or closing monologues often remind us – is the fundamental stuff of which the Zone is made. You can see its appeal as source material for a non-traditional, left-field Christmas stage show.

Rather than work in a similar way to the series and simply whack, say, two 30-minute episodes each side of the interval, Anne Washburn has interwoven versions of eight teleplays (six of them written by Serling, with Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont the other original authors). It’s determined that we shouldn’t for a moment miss how different it is, and how knowing. Scenes are changed, sometimes after barely a couple of minutes, by supernumeraries dressed in greatcoats blending with the starscape backdrop of Paul Steinberg’s 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 familiar 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”. (There’s even an unsubtle coda in which John Marquez effectively plays Serling himself.) This is the stuff we know and love. And yet it isn’t. I’m afraid it suggests not a twilight here-and-there duality, but self-conscious effort.

Moreover, the series worked because it was so palpably just half a step sideways from actual Fifties/early Sixties preoccupations: the new frontier of space, the limitless power of the atom, a growing popular awareness of human psychology. This dates the material heavily, and when Washburn tries to insert updates (as in a story about fractious neighbours vying for space in a fallout shelter), it accentuates rather than alleviates the differences. It raises smiles and chuckles at its quaintness, but no chills or musings. Unlike the parallel dimension in one of the stories, this is not a Zone that intersects with our own world.

Written for the Financial Times.