On a different planet

RETURN TO THE FORBIDDEN PLANET

(Palace, Manchester, to Saturday)

BOB Carlton has lost his sense of humour. If he ever had one.

In the 15 years since I last saw this classic show directed by its creator, he has put together easily the weakest of the several I have seen.

This iteration of the classic touring show takes a long time to get going, suffers from a deadly lack of pace and energy and has to work very hard to overcome a not-immediately-likeable bunch of performers.

Always a difficult mix of great Fifties and Sixties pop, corrupted lines from Shakespeare and cheesy parody of The Tempest and B-movie Forbidden Planet, this stop at the Palace is the tour’s final week of almost four months on the road, and while the cast tries hard, it’s clear they are getting tired.

The show’s wayward dialogue needs a cast at the very top of its game to negotiate it with complete success, and what we get here is a cast delivering the dialogue too slowly, without the essential tongue-in-cheek irony and without a sense of urgency.

In the second half you would be hard-pressed to work out the plot at all, so disjointed and fragmented is it.

As the show opened last night the audience was having a hard time in the first 30 minutes settling in: only when Cookie (Mark Newnham) launched into the usual, blistering guitar solo near the end of the first act — I’ve never quite known what it is for, but at least it puts a jolt of rock ‘n’roll electricity into the crowd — did things really liven up.

Among the performers, deliberate archness seems to have taken the place of wry humour and with this dialogue, that won’t do the job.

I liked Jonathan Markwood’s Prospero and Christine Holman as the Science Officer, but in all other cases the group seems better commended for its playing rather than acting abilities.

Finally, Brian May, who puts in a filmed appearance as the “Chorus” needs only wire-rimmed specs to go with the tightly-curled grey hair to look like an 18th Century high court judge. Someone should tell him...