@ Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until Sat 10 Oct 2015 (part of A Play, A Pie and A Pint season)
To give it all up and start again somewhere new is bold. But when that “somewhere new” is Mars, it’s even bolder. Dream or compulsion, you need to be damn sure why you’re going there, because chance are you’re not coming back. For young, married couple Dawn (Rosie Mason) and Neil (Darren Seed), an unemployed customer service adviser and a taxi driver, escaping Mum’s spare room seems reason enough. No money, no prospects – why stay here when you can be up there?
This short play by Adam Peck starts jokily, with our couple auditioning, reality TV style, for this mission of a lifetime. Despite dallying with some political hot potatoes during the questioning – intergenerational inequality, housing, immigration (it would be no surprise to find Dawn votes UKIP) – it manages to keep upbeat as we watch this simple, ordinary duo somehow make it to the launchpad. It’s only once they’re in space that a series of flashbacks reveals the sadness underlying the childhood sweethearts’ one way trip. There’s cute moments right to the end, but it’s no happy-ever-after love story.
Mason and Seed don’t exude obvious chemistry as a couple, but they both play well. Under the direction of Nik Partridge, they skip between light-hearted and serious niftily, and manage to very effectively portray a take-off with nothing more than the chairs they’re sat on. On the other hand, the Big Brother diary room set-up of their messages to Earth is merely functional, something of a necessary evil given the scenario, and allows slack moments, like Dawn sharing her sketches, that add little to the story.
Like Bowie’s Space Oddity that plays on the way in, or the Hollywood blockbusters Neil reels off during his audition, 140 Million Miles successfully captures both the wonder and the existential terror of space-travel. In its short timespan, it might not plunge the same emotional depths as the classics of the genre, and it plays a little fast and loose with some of the practicalities of interplanetary tourism, but there’s no doubting it makes an impression. Space and the human heart – both vast and complex.