Alone – REVIEW
Image: Kat Glass and Courney Bassett in Alone. Photo - Luke Thornborough
It’s an unspecified time in the future. Earth has been rendered uninhabitable due to carbon dioxide saturation. Two women, a scientist and a pilot, are on a spacecraft cruising back to Earth after a two-year quest. Their crowd-funded mission has been successful – they have on board, a plant containing a micro-bacterium that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen. Planet Earth is saved!
That would be the plot for a five-minute play, but Alone is 90 minutes long and it is tense, riveting, funny, thoughtful, and emotionally charged.
Written by Luke Thornborough and performed by Kat Glass and Courtney Bassett, Alone is a slowly unfolding, increasingly suspenseful single scene and setting piece that explores themes of climate change, gender politics, ethics, sacrifice, religion, and the virtues of ‘70s and ‘80s esoteric British pop stars.
Glass plays Dr Sarah Taylor, an obsessive, slightly arrogent scientist who is fully invested in her belief that the alien plant-life they have discovered and propagated will reverse climate change on Earth. Taylor’s eagerness to return home is equal parts altruistic and vain – she knows she’ll be lauded as a hero.
Bassett is Jessica Holland, a young but very capable pilot who is unassuming, curious, and a perhaps a bit juvenile. The play opens with Holland wildly playing air-guitar to David Bowie’s “Starman” (The whole song – something they might want to re-think as it wears thin after a while).
As the plot proceeds, we learn snippets about each character through occasional conversations which sometimes turn into confrontations. Taylor is Jewish and her faith is important to her. Though a scientist, she believes in God.
Holland shares a pivotal event in her family history that seems to have shaped much of who she is and how she thinks.
Midway through the play, their spacecraft, The Lily of the Nile (a name Holland detests), suffers calamitous damage after going through an asteroid field. It literally and figuratively changes the course of things.
This is a clever, well-written play, performed seamlessly by Glass and Bassett.
It will take you on a ride.
