Review of Life Out There – astronauts search for meaning in mysterious space | Section

From David Bowie’s Maj Tom and Elton John’s Rocketman via Capt Oates in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers to this summer’s Ryan Gosling film Project Hail Mary, the astronaut who can’t come home has been a household name since Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth in 1961.

Another floating lone figure is the main character in Ransack Theatre’s Life Out There by Tim Foley, a regular writer in the Doctor Who universe. Cmdr Isaacs, one of the five explorers who were on a mission to find another Earth after the first world was destroyed in unknown but hypothetical ways, disappeared on a solo expedition. But he is still present in a large capsule like a voice (Jack Myers) who can be a game of AI, memory or spirit from his four colleagues when they decide to reach the galactic space SQ356, the representative of the second human Eden.

The remaining rocket crew are Witney (Sophie Steer), who calls her remote work, and techie Baby (Brianna Douglas), burdened with knowing how bad things are in the eyes of the others. River (Samuel Gosrani) struggles to accept that Isaacs may be gone forever while Clarke (Alastair Michael), a zoologist (“the bird”), dreams of the first child due to rebirth in every household.

These characters give Foley the vivid pride of being awake to three forms of life: the aliens, the missing aliens and the next generation of humans. Joining Project Hail Mary in the star-studded part of Earth’s disaster, Life Out There shares with another recent film, Steven Spielberg’s Revelation Day, an interest in reconciling astronomy, nature and theology. (This is also similar to Foley’s 2022 Electric Rosary(which explored the tension between science and religion through the medium of robotics.) As in Spielberg’s magazine, the characters in the story wonder whether the vast, fascinating universe might exist in an afterlife or a pre-life. Inevitably unanswered, these questions are interestingly asked.

Inside Milla Clark’s rigid spaceship tube, showing the fragility of a rocket’s life, director Piers Black cleverly tries to convey weight. Another departure from the text is through the middle eclipse (lighting Alex Fernandes, music and voice Patch Middleton) which shows the sequence of mime (the movement of Chi-San Howard) and different levels of reality.

Due to play on the night (16 July) at Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, Life Out There offers Maj Tom’s atmospheric experience “over a hundred miles” and the oddity of the mind and the atmosphere.