Life Out There review – astronauts search for meaning in atmospheric space oddity
These lonely travellers overlap with Bowie’s Maj Tom, Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary or Spielberg’s Disclosure Day as they contemplate our place in the vastness of the void
From David Bowie’s Maj Tom and Elton John’s Rocketman via Capt Oates in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers to this summer’s Ryan Gosling movie Project Hail Mary, the astronaut who may be unable to come home has been a recurrent cultural character since Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth in 1961.
Another lonely floater is the pivotal figure in Ransack Theatre’s Life Out There by Tim Foley, a regular writer in the Doctor Who universe. Cmdr Isaacs, one of five explorers on a mission to find an alternative Earth after the first one was destroyed in unspecified but guessable ways, has vanished on a solo shuttle flight. But he is still a presence in the main capsule as a voice (Jack Myers) that may be AI recreation, memory or ghost from the viewpoints of his four crew mates as they contemplate landing on galactic location SQ356, a candidate for humanity’s second Eden.
The remaining rocket people are sarcastic wisecracker Witney (Sophie Steer), who calls her distant mission “the word’s slowest commute”, and engineering genius Baby (Brianna Douglas), burdened with knowing how bad things are before the others do. River (Samuel Gosrani) struggles to accept that Isaacs may be gone forever while Clarke (Alastair Michael), a twitchy ornithologist (“bird nerd”), dreams of a first child due to be born back on whatever remains of home.
These characters give Foley the neat conceit of parallel vigils for three forms of life: extraterrestrial, the missing astronaut and the next human generation. Overlapping with Project Hail Mary in the galactic recce caused by an Earthly emergency, Life Out There shares with another current movie, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, an interest in reconciling cosmology, ecology and theology. (This also echoes Foley’s 2022 Electric Rosary, which explored tension between science and religion through robot nuns.) As in the Spielberg, characters wonder if the bemusing vastness of space might hold an afterlife or before life. Inevitably unanswerable, these questions are interestingly asked.
Within Milla Clark’s tight grey tube of spaceship cross section, suggesting the claustrophobic fragility of rocket life, director Piers Black sensibly makes minimal attempts to simulate weightlessness. Another departure from documentary is through intermittent fizzing eclipses (lighting Alex Fernandes, music and sound Patch Middleton) that introduce mime sequences (movement Chi-San Howard) and different layers of reality.
Fittingly due to play a night (16 July) at Jodrell Bank observatory in Cheshire, Life Out There gives an atmospheric sense of Maj Tom’s “beyond one hundred thousand miles” and the psychological and metaphysical oddity of space.