X Thoughts About X.

X by Alistair McDowell
Directed by Vicky Featherstone
Royal Court - Jerwood Downstairs.

Where did the leaves come from?

Whew, Jessica Raine is a good actor.

Was the second act in a different room?

Where did the kitchen cabinet go?

If everything was reconstructed and re-enacted from the start why were there scenes that did not include Gilda?

Why did we not see the moment where everyone realised the clock wasn’t working?

What was the point of Cole?

It really isn’t cool to use attempted suicide in that way.

If comms were working and you couldn’t get anything back from earth, what about contacting all the other stations that kept getting mentioned? Mars? 

Why introduce proper hardcore horror conventions in the first half and then not use them again?

Why was only Ray haunted by the little girl?

There were big ideas here.

Each half felt like two separate plays.

Oh girls talking about masturbating! 

When you splice and play with genre conventions internal logic still should work.

As if you were the main character mate!

Black outs don’t actually add anything to the idea that time is distorted when they automatically make your audience shift into disconnected non-narrative headspace anyway.

If there was love why did we not see a connection echoed before in the reconstructions?

The idea of listening to silence is beautiful.

Were they ever in space?

If there are no trees how was there a cardboard serial box?

The bloody climax of the first act actually had no impact at all on the second.

I'm kinda impressed this got staged on a mainstream stage.

The way the world disintegrated was done very well but might have meant more if it had been established in the first place, if that wasn’t all a desperate reconstruction of events.

X = love

X = equations/the unknown

X = marks the spot

X = a kiss

X = treasure

X = the indefinable

X = what came before

X = a bloody gash across slit wrists.

X = X

I was waiting for something to happen at that window.

My dramaturg senses are twitching.

The set was amazing.

Why did nobody sing?

The way the stories merged together worked well but if the entire premise was based around retelling these stories then that should have been worked in from the start.

Stories.

What we tell each other to keep each other sane?

When there is nothing else left.

To give each other hope.

To live.