A full house, quiet, a twilit lull, then into the dark and the sound of an electronic signal, coming in, cutting out; difficult to hear dialogue. I could make out some words: that of an astronaut, an astronaut in the dark, the voice of Neil Armstrong in the dark, in communication with NASA. Beep beep! We hear Armstrong’s surprise that from the lunar surface, you can’t see the stars, no stars…
The Bristol company Sleepdogs is a collaboration between writer/composer Timothy X Atack and producer/director Tanuja Amarasuriya. They work with stories. I saw Astronaut as a free lunchtime show at Brighton Festival, where it was part of Caravan – a biennial curated showcase of site-specific, interactive and incidental performance.
With a direct narrative delivered by Tim X Atack – using one microphone, near darkness and a wonderfully evocative soundscape – Astronaut shows us what would have happened if the Apollo 11 mission had failed and the astronauts had been unable to return. Tim gives us the speech that Nixon had prepared had this been the outcome. NASA would have shut down all connection and communication. The astronauts left with a diminishing oxygen supply, nothing but silence, and the curve of the earth and a sky devoid of stars – what would they have done? How would they have used their last breaths? Perhaps a song… and what song would that have been? In the final minutes we are left with that question and our own imaginations are thrown out into the magnitude of an endless night. In its simplicity, making no big drama of such a chilling possibility, Astronaut is a precise yet tender telling of the precarious balance between life and death, full of perfect timing, delivery and… space…