Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Stephen Cunningham.
It is all about Time, how we attempt to understand it, how it tempts, teases, and controls us, Time punishes the wary and the inquisitive alike, it finds ways to deceive us, to humble and humiliate us, get too close and it leaves scars, stay away from investigating it, from immersing yourself within its non-corporeal hold and it will tear you layer from layer, it will chew down on your soul and ravage you. Time is a beast, a friend, a lawyer, an advocate and one that must unravel slowly, the tick and the tock always reminding us that if we see into our own futures, that of our own species, the result could drive us mad.
Elton Townend Jones’ adaption of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine captures the relationship we have with the entity in such a way that, unlike the magnificent film released with Rod Taylor in the lead role, which was for its own time reflected the stereo-typical sense of the heroic interloper’s need to restore a balance to the situation they had stumbled upon. This particular adaption took the character out of a moral comfort zone and placed him within the walls of his own damnation, his intrigue with Time inducing a near hysteria in which the puzzle before him, of the Eloi and The Morlocks, seemingly took him to the edge of psychosis.
It requires agility, a sense of furrowed brow and persuasive endurance to carry off a play with just one performer, to frame Time in such a manner that it can be witnessed as both executioner of the human spirit, and of the guide we seek in our lives, that one unending source of information in which only Time can illuminate like a series of matches struck against the darkness, revealing one scene at a time.
It is an agility and conquering of spirit in which Stephen Cunningham brought to the Atkinson Studio stage with absolute passion, the sense of being at the mercy of that which he sought to be taught by was endearing, passionate, and one that was understood to be the reason of humanity’s desperation to tame the untameable, a lion does not quake with cowardice in the shadows of men, Time does not stand still in the struggles of humanity’s child-like reason.
A powerful and dramatically fuelled adaption of a classic tale, The Time Machine remains one of the finest pieces of literature because it endures, precisely what the mechanics of Time insists upon.
Ian D. Hall