Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Tycho: Mankind’s First Hotel on the Moon!
Imperial College Dramatic Society (ICDS)
Genre: LGBTQIA+, Sci-fi, Theatre
Venue: theSpaceUK
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A “new, dark comedy exploring how suffocating hiding the truth can be”. Set in a hotel on the moon, this sci-fi theatre piece, running at 45 minutes, covers a lot of ground and explores some interesting themes through a comedy drama that turns to something of a thriller before reaching its important conclusion.
Review
“Tycho: Mankind’s First Hotel on the Moon!” by the Imperial College Dramatic Society (ICDS) plays in an intimate three-sided performance space at theSpace at Niddry Street. This 45-minute science fiction-based short play is set, as the title reveals, in a privately owned hotel on the moon, evoking a lunar world, an oxygen bubble in which air is literally everything. Indeed, this clever piece cannot be fully discussed without spoiling it. So, this review will provide just a few bare bones of the story and mostly focus on the play’s theatrical aspects.
This is a well-imagined piece with a decent story arc and an important ending. It would not look out of place in a volume of Kurt Vonnegut short stories and plays (he wrote a few of those).
Costumes and sets create the hotel in space perfectly well, and there’s a 50s B-movie feel to this, with the double-flat pictorial scenery being the main device to create the world we are invited into. Charlie is our protagonist, bemused at the start and certain by the end. It is a play that explores suffocation, literally and symbolically, and achieves that aim. The audience was appreciative of the journey they had been taken on, reflected in the warm applause at the end.
Dramatically, the piece was a bit slow to get going at the start, but the actors soon got into their stride and some comedy interplay in the first part of the play developed well into the darker elements towards the end.
The cast works well together in a lunar hotel setting where this place is a viable escape from the Earth below, a rising end-times feel created well. This is the future, and things are not rosy on Terra Firma.
Dialogue needs improvement in places, and there is scope, especially in the first fifteen minutes, to inhabit the script more fully and more quickly. But it does get into its stride. There is also a conscious decision to be made between this being rooted in character acting or caricature. There’s an unevenness here that needs a bit of finessing. Some of the physicality is good and the cast interact well. In other places, that physicality needs more control and intensity. A face slap can be fakes but still needs to look realistic.
The writer has created an intriguing lunar setting; the science fiction is well realised, but sometimes the actors are too much a vessel for the clever lines and quips in the script. Further character development and exposition are needed for us to be fully invested in all of them and not just the central “hero,” Charlie.
The strength here is the hotel. The description of it (for an off-planet world has to be created for us in less than an hour) is strong, and at heart, we have an unravelling, emerging narrative that builds genuine tension, especially in the final ten minutes, all set effectively against a pre-apocalyptic terrestrial backdrop. Science fiction permits the imagination to run free. We can go to the edge, and the writer can, if they choose, rescue us from the brink. Does that happen in this play? You’ll have to see it to find out.
Stagecraft needs a bit more work, and dramaturgy will tighten both the script and pace the narrative a little better. In a futuristic hotel, knocking on something wooden offstage before entering the room doesn’t quite cut the mustard. Either do that consistently as a running joke, poking fun at private enterprise cutting costs and corners, or let’s have some more tightly defined and delivered sound effects. (These can be vocally delivered, as happens later in the piece—the key point is to be consistent.)
The humour in the script doesn’t overload an engaging narrative. The ending is satisfying in what is a good attempt to imagine a corporate-driven future, a darker scenario for us all. But running through the piece is a bold intention to explore a different, equally important issue. What happens if what we hold in ultimately suffocates us? Time is running out for Charlie and for those around him as well. I was glad it ended as it did. And one other thing is for sure. If the speculation in this show turns out to be even half true, I will never stay in a Travelodge on Ganymede.
