This modern version of H G Well’s War of the Worlds is a technical masterpiece. Four actors act their hearts out to tell the story, while three of them are in turns throughout holding cameras to film the action on stage and project it onto a huge screen.
The choreography of everyone being in the right place at the right time to place the miniature props (car windows, the iron bars of cages, broken pieces of buildings) in front of the right faces is balletic in its precision.
Thus, we see the protagonist Will Travers (in a sterling performance by Gareth Cassidy) wake up in his bloodied pyjamas from his hospital bed and travel in a fever dream through a bombed out London, still in flames – an abandoned tube station, and a deserted road to reach his wife and home in Epsom.
Whereas H G Wells’s original story, published in 1898 was an essay on colonialism (prescient because the Boer War in South Africa began in 1899) this modern adaptation for Imitating the Dog, written and directed by Andrew Quick and Pete Brooks, is about racism and hysteria about immigration.
As in the original story, creatures have invaded the earth from another planet. Whereas Wells had Martians, who were eventually defeated by their vulnerability to the earth’s bacteria, Imitating the Dog has giant mechanical devices which destroy all in their path.
The opening of the play (more a film within a film than a play within a play – and technically absolutely fascinating) is silent. To be honest, this does feel quite drawn out. One wonders when the play is going to start. We see Will in his hospital bed, surrounded by medics in green scrubs. We guess the rest of the action is a dream because people come and go in changing sequences and the rest of the cast stay in scrubs.
Great support here from Amy Dunn as Will’s wife Evie, with Bonnie Baddoo and Morgan Bailey as multiple other characters. This is an unforgettable piece of theatre, cleverly composed to show us Will’s journey with stirring original music by James Hamilton and a brilliant set by Abby Clarke.
Will is in hospital because he has been injured by a police horse on a demonstration in 1968 supporting the Conservative MP Enoch Powell. Powell made his infamous Rivers of Blood speech that year saying: “We must be mad” to invite immigrants to Britain’s shores.
He was sacked by Opposition Leader Edward Heath the next day from the shadow cabinet. Ironically, from 1960 to 1963, Powell had been Minister of Health. Perhaps he had never visited a hospital.
At the start of the play, we see that Will has a National Front membership badge. Ironically, as one of Morgan Bailey’s characters says, the British population that once cried: “Stop them coming” is now itself fleeing for France. We see Will and Evie desperately trying to reach Dover.
An exquisite piece of stagecraft.
War of the Worlds is at Cambridge Arts Theatre until Saturday, May 2.
