Return to the Forbidden Planet @ Maddermarket Theatre

Tin foil helmets, Shakespearean robots and tentacled space monsters? This doesn’t describe my confused adolescent sexual awakening but Return to the Forbidden Planet, a sci fi romp more camp than your local scout troop. Set phasers to fun! (Oh God, I hate myself for just writing that... I hate myself more than you could ever possibly hate me...I’m going to hell. Somebody confiscate my pens).

There’s always a perverse pleasure to be taken in subverting the serious and undermining the esteemed. You don’t need to burst their balloons, just let a little air out from time to time. What better balloon of high art to gently deflate but that of The Bard – Return to the Forbidden Planet being a loose retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. To take this theatrical classic and set it in the style of an early twentieth century sci fi serial is a ridiculous and wonderful juxtaposition, throw in a soundtrack of 50’s and 60’s rock and roll classics and you have a show that is absurd and out of this world! (My God, what’s wrong with me, another atrocious pun?! I must be stopped!)

I have to admit, I’m not a fan of the jukebox musical. It often feels to be a mostly commercial endeavour to shoe-horn a few popular songs around a contrived and dull plot. Thankfully the source material and style of this show save it from that fate. It may seem an odd mix but science fiction and musicals share a great deal thematically. Absurd and elaborate plots and characters that take time from the story for large set pieces. For one it’s a song, the other it’s a space battle or an encounter with an alien monster. For efficiency, this show combines the two!

The language of the show is another interesting point - the dialogue is mostly composed of Shakespearean quotes and passages woven together to tell the story and drive the plot. It may be jarring at first but it too is thematically appropriate for science fiction, a genre that is known for its often cliché use of techno babble. If you can’t understand Scotty’s engineering explanations or Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter, what’s the difference?! It all sounds convincing and leads wonderfully into the next set piece musical number with Picard tap dancing in his ready room. The literary quotes too allow for a great deal of knowing references and terrible puns, the latter of which appears to be contagious.

The Maddermarket’s production is fun, it is colourfull, it is camp and it is thoroughly enjoyable. It’s perhaps the most technically ambitious show I have seen from the Norwich Players and their aspiration is in keeping with the best adventurous science fiction. If perhaps it, very occasionally, didn’t reach its lofty goals it was not to the detriment of the show; if you reach for the stars and fall short, you still land on a cloud.

The set is simply wonderful, both in design and implementation and lends itself perfectly to the show. As on the bridge of the Enterprise, great fun can be had by looking past the main actors to those in the background pressing random buttons and flipping random switches and generally just titting about, doing whatever it is science fiction crew members do. There are plenty of switches to choose from and yet more wonderful reference to classic sci fi in film and TV in the set and the view screens used throughout.

The costumes are wonderful with yet more influences drawn from different SF staples, original Star Trek, Captain Scarlet, Flash Gordon and more. A few male crew members really evoked Bill Shatner’s Kirk (or Futurama’s Zap Branigan!) with a swaggering groin orientated walk, an erratic line delivery and a small paunch that shows you’re a real man that drinks whiskey at every meal. It was excellent!

It is a pastiche and an homage to SF and to Shakespeare and the love for both is obvious, leading the audience along to a joyous conclusion. A special treat was an appearance from Terry Molloy, a former Dr Who Davros, who also narrated the show.