The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

So: I saw the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy stage show, at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith.

I didn’t know quite what to make of it. I knew it was going to be interactive: I suppose I was expecting some kind of walk-through exhibition, like that Doctor Who Experience I went to in London when my niece and nephew were still young enough to be excited by it.

Actually, it was more like a drama school production of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight I saw sometime in the last century. The Round Table set up in the student theatre; the Green Chapel on the croquet lawn, and the audience following Gawain on his hero's journey, bumping into improv students playing peasants and trolls in the various corridors.

Less a high budget exhibition, more a piece of highly inventive community theatre.

Which had had quite a lot of money spent on it, and with very high class actors.

As I say, I didn’t know quite what to make of it. 

The trouble with adapting Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is that everyone knows the story. And all the jokes. I think I could do a pretty good job of reciting the actual script by heart. That's what made the movie so agonising. I saw the Finsbury Park Rainbow production in 1980 which pretty much treated the first series (the primary phase, if you insist) as a script and performed it as a play. With dry ice and sense-surround and lasers and a rock soundtrack. It ran a bit under three hours which is shorter than Hamlet. I understand that Douglas Adams hated it. I am still surprised my parents let me go to the theatre by myself.

Whenever a Much Loved book or comic or TV series is remade or adapted, there is always an off-stage claque screaming for comic-book accuracy, TV accuracy, Bronte sister accuracy. Offer up a homage — a virtual love letter — to a beloved 1960s comic book, and a certain contingent will say that their entire childhood has been retrospectively ruined because the wrong character had a moustache.

If you invested in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in that way, it's safe to say that you won't like the production. But if you aren’t invested in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy at all, I am afraid you may not know what is going on. Or why you should care.

The Riverside Hitchhiker does not follow the plot of the radio series or the book. It arguably doesn’t quite have a plot of its own, either. There are not very many of Douglas Adams jokes left. Instead, it’s a riff or an homage to the entire Hitchhiker phenomenon—radio series and all five books and even the movie. I think I even spotted an allusion to Eoin Colfer’s massively misjudged sequel.

Certainly, there are references to the Total Perspective Vortex; the Perfectly Normal Beasts and appearances from Lintilla and the Great Green Arkleseizure’s evangelical missionaries. Arthur’s relationship with Fenchurch is the main driver of what plot there is. Trillion isn't in it at all.

It runs to ninety minutes, but doesn’t feel short. So much is happening and the energy levels are so high that I doubt that either cast or audience could have sustained it for any longer.

Oh, and there are songs. They are mostly harmless. 

This is the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy reimagined as a piece of Samuel Beckett absurdism, but then extruded into the form of a life-affirming musical. I am pretty sure that Arthur literally says “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time?” at one point. In the final moments, the Ultimate Question is revealed (sort of). It is roughly "love conquers all". Everyone becomes good and happy. Including Marvin, although he doesn’t like it, much.

I am sure this is all fascinating, Andrew, you are saying: but what actually, you know, happens?

Well: it is a walk through, in that it takes place across two big spaces (the Pub and the Vogon ship) and one transitional space (the Heart of Gold). It takes a surprisingly long time for anything to, as such, happen. I imagine we spend as much as ten minutes milling around the pub (real drinks are on sale) before the major action starts. But the actors (Ford, Fenchurch, maybe Zaphod, and then Arthur) are already talking and interacting with individual audience members. 

The narrative conceit is that this is Arthur’s first date with Fenchurch, but also the day of the destruction of the Earth, so Ford and Zaphod have come back in time to rescue them. Fenchurch, you will remember, is the woman from the small cafe in Rickmansworth who had worked out how the world could be made a good and happy place moments before the Vogons demolished it. Later books retconned her idea as the first inklings of the Ultimate Question. Arthur will spend the next few centuries trying to get back together with her.

An old fashioned phone by the bar starts ringing; and one of the bar staff invites me to pick it up. I do so, and find myself talking to a future version of Arthur Dent, who tells me that in a few minutes, he is going to be at his lowest ebb, and it is essential that I tell him to make a complaint. Ford hands another member of the audience a physical copy of the Guide for future use. The audience seem to be fully on board with this—all heckles and interactions are in the right spirit—and the cast are incredibly sharp and quick witted about incorporating audience input into the performance. There is quite a lot of well-integrated pre-recorded video material: so the arrival of the Vogon Destructor Fleet (reported by blink and you’ll miss her BBC science correspondent Trisha McMillon) is shown on big TV screens in the pub, and sections from the Guide (heavily influenced by the visual style of the TV show) are projected on the walls and the ceiling. I do indeed ask Arthur to make a complaint: and he gets in touch with the Vogons, who ask him for ten good reasons not to destroy the earth. The Vogons are also on the big screens. I assume someone off stage is able to cue up pre-recorded reactions to our suggestions. I think someone from the audience really does suggest “poetry” which provokes a spontaneous recitation: but I am sure if they hadn’t Arthur would have done it himself. For all I know there is material that is seen on some nights and not others depending on what path the audience takes. Certainly, no single member of the audience sees all the material on a given night. On the Vogon ship, I get taken to one side and asked to fill out some Vogon paperwork by Lintilla: and subsequently get a lecture in sandwich making by another Future Version of Arthur. I think that is the point when someone who didn’t know the books would have lost the plot, literally and figuratively. I can see that there is also a Zaphod For President campaign booth, and possibly a revival meeting being organised by the Great Green Arklseizure’s worshippers. 

We transition from there directly to Magrathea where the plot comes together, somewhat. Slartibartfast gets the best song of the evening (did I mention that there were songs?) which certainly includes the line “I would far rather be happy than right.” He is either going to recreate the earth from scratch, or use the Total Perspective Vortex to recreate Fenchurch from Arthur’s memories of her.

But you don’t want to know any of that. What you want to know is, how did they do Zaphod’s two heads?

Zaphod first appears as a video insert on the TV screen in the pub; arguing with Ford about whether he is going to allow all these ape-descended life-forms onto his spaceship. In that sequence, he has a functioning second head. But when we are all herded onto the Heart of Gold, he appears in the flesh, and harangues us with a sort of cynical stand-up routine. (“I’m not going to beat about the bush; unless that’s what you are into….Tough crowd.”) When he comes on stage, his spare head is unwell, and covered over by a hessian sack. If you think that’s clever, you’ll probably get on with the show: if you think it’s cheating, you may not. 

Marvin is one of those life-sized marionettes: you can see the puppeteer operating him from behind; a bit like Warhorse only more depressing. He doesn't get much to do in the narrative: he's just there. It’s a far better visualisation of Marvin than either the movie or the TV show. I seem to remember liking the way they did him at the Rainbow, but that was a long time ago and few there are that remember.

I think that the creators of the show were True Fans: fans who have read and digested the whole canon, and who could draw you a diagam of how every scene in the play relates to a scene in one of the books. But I think that perhaps you have to be a True Fan to be fully on board with what they are attempting.

I think that someone who doesn’t know the books — or worse, someone who has seen the TV show or the movie but nothing else — would be simply baffled by it. I think they would feel that they were at the centre of a maelstrom around which a kaleidoscope of whacky characters are just barely glimpsed. As if you are on the edge of a story that you never quite get to hear. But that isn’t a bad description of how the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy originally felt.

I think Douglas Adams might have approved. A sense of desperation creeps into his later books: even though he has worked out a story that he wants to tell about Arthur Dent, he knows that most of his readers are going to turn to the end “which is a good bit and has got Marvin in it”. I know a lot of people pretty much disregard the sequels, in the same way that there are former Star Wars fans who snort “fan fiction” if you so much as mention Rey Skywalker. This production treats the “trilogy in five parts” as an artistic whole. 

How does a writer feel when someone takes their multi-book epic, tears it up into little pieces; throws then in the air, and makes a collage out of what they catch? Or possibly, reads your book so many times that they know it better than you do; and then make up a new story in homage to it; weaving in and out of the margins of your contradictory plots and sub plots. 

I think they feel good about it.

To use the Star Wars analogy again: this play arguably redeems So Long and Thanks For All the Fish in the way that The Clone Wars cartoon arguably redeems the Phantom Menace. 

If you think it does. If you don’t, attendance is not compulsory.

I mean: we could have just walked into a theatre and sat back a listened to some jobbing actors saying “Far out in the darkest reaches of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of The  Galaxy…” in a funny voice, with whatever visuals the company could contrive up with to go with it. And that could have been a lot of fun. I believe it is roughly what the Monty Python reunion show did a few years ago: a chance for some increasingly elderly comedians and fans to remember how funny these jokes used to be. But I don’t really think there would have been that much point.

I wish I could see it again. I think I would have enjoyed the spectacle more if I had known where the show was headed. On a first viewing, it was hard not to be thinking “Oh, I expect that big flashing globe thing is Deep Thought, no, we seem to have skipped that bit....the lady selling raffle tickets, which book is that from?” On a second viewing I could just enjoy the experience.  

But I think I have talked myself into it. 

Mostly excellent: forty two out of ten.

If you found this interesting, read my main blog.

And consider supporting my Patreon.