X Review, Royal Court

As a star vehicle, Alistair McDowall's X is more Arthur Daley than Jack Barclay. Except.. the vehicle in question is a space station, not a car, as X is the story of an ill-fated expedition of astronauts abandoned forever to nothingness on Pluto. Why Pluto?  Well, they're Brits, and in a post apocalyptic world where the earth has lost all its trees and birds and everyone's fleeing to the moon and beyond, we get Pluto because the dastardly Americans got first dibs on Mars. Except... within minutes of arriving to research possibilities, the vehicle failed. It is stuck forever on the dwarf planet.

The star is the quirky stage and TV favourite, Jessica Raine, who valiantly attempts to breathe life into Gilda, a character who says barely anything of interest and is stir-crazy when we first meet her and totally crazy by the end. The play spans perhaps twenty or thirty years in Pluto time. In the stalls of the Royal Court, the first half felt almost as long. I was quite envious of the sleepers alongside. The pace picks up in the final hour. Much of that is thanks to Lee Curran and Nick Powell's brilliant light and sound design which creates and builds tension far more successfully than the dialogue.

X is a play that bristles with possibility and often appears profound, but doesn't engage and feels incomplete. The characterisation is scant. As the action starts at the point where dysfunction is already affecting the crew's interactions, how can we know the impact or extent of their deterioration?  Occasionally interesting allusions and hallucinations that point to their lives before Pluto, are presented without context or conviction. The one scene that remains in the mind is when Gilda and Clark (James Harkness), after years of sharing the same stories, start retelling them in ever shorter fragments that reduce finally to X. It's odd, but has echoes of Nick Payne's Constellations, and it works.


In conclusion: Under Vicky Featherstone's nimble direction the supporting cast  - James Harkness, Darrell D'Silva, Ria Zmitrowicz, and Rudi Dharmalingam - works hard with an unsatisfying script and Raine is terrific. Fans will enjoy seeing her in the intimacy of The Royal Court, but it'll be the star, more than the play, that they'll applaud.

References
Royal Court Theatre, X, Tickets

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London SW1.   Run ends May 7.