There is something of a slow burning genre on the rise at the moment, which is to take iconic radio shows – of which the BBC has a long and justly proud history – and tour them as live stage shows.
Up until now, this has revived shows – like Round the Horne – that not only had a live studio audience in the first place, but for whom most of the cast have now long gone. In the case of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show: Live! the reverse of both these points are true.
Most of the surviving cast members are back to repeat their roles – Simon Jones (Arthur Dent), Geoff McGivern (Ford Prefect), Mark Wing-Davey (Zaphod Beeblebrox) and Susan Sheridan. (Trillian). The voice of Marvin, the paranoid android, still comes from Stephen Moore, but he’s represented on stage physically by a puppeteered robot, which is a thing of beauty, looking like the result of a divine relationship between a reel to reel from the Radiophonic Workshop and a 1950’s wireless.
For anyone who is already familiar with the various upgrades of the Guide – the original radio series, the books, the first stage production, the computer game, the film and, yes, a towel on which the plot was printed, all of which tell the same story, but in entirely different ways – it should come as no surprise that as the evening goes on the narrative arc becomes not only increasingly muddled, but increasingly irrelevant, and therefore part of the joke.
There’s an assumption that most of the audience have already consumed most of the versions mentioned above, allowing the characters to flip back and forth in time and space, revisiting fan favourite moments with a healthy lack of respect for narrative structure (for instance, the big reveal regarding the ultimate answer for life, the universe and everything is thrown away in the first twenty minutes)
Each night, there’s a visiting guest star as the voice of the Book. On the night of this review, at Brighton’s Theatre Royal, it’s the turn of national poet Roger McGough. Once you’ve gotten over the confusion of not hearing the arch, perfectly timed pauses of Peter Jones’ creation, McGough makes a fine Book, his careful, even cautious tones being perfectly in keeping with a book that has the words ‘Don’t Panic!’ written cheerfully on the cover.
Linking the random scenes (and, indeed, the scenes with Random) are a few moments of new material, and these do creak slightly, or at least as much as the diodes down Marvin’s left side. But that hardly matters, since it fits in well with the mood of the production, which feels very much like a 1970s college revue, all drenched in prog rock and cheerfully fluffed lines – which, to be fair, is likely to be how it all started.
In short then, not a show for non-froods who don’t know where their towel is, but for everyone who automatically answers any question about the meaning of life with a number, this is great, silly fun, even if these days, it’s less a sci-fi word play romp, and more a unashamedly affectionate love letter to the man who started it all, Douglas Adams.
Performed on Thursday 12th July 2012 at Theatre Royal in Brighton.
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