Strange to report that the least interesting aspect of this adaptation of The Time Machine is the stuff written by HG Wells. In a devised production by Jordan & Skinner, four actors take turns wearing an outsize top hat to tell the story of the Victorian gentleman who leaps ahead to the year 802,701 and finds humanity has evolved into a two-tier society. Languishing on the surface are the Eloi, as feeble as they are privileged; suffering in subterranean gloom are the Morlocks, an underclass of hard-working cannibals.
These passages from the 1895 novella are not so much dramatised as spoken aloud, the author’s radical warning about the consequences of industrial exploitation remaining more literary than theatrical. Despite attempts to physicalise the divided human race – the Eloi, weightless and bendy; the Morlocks, lumpen and crouched – the production holds back from immersing itself in this future world.
That is because the company is less interested in Wells’s sci-fi fantasy than in the divisions of today. Directed by Caitlin Skinner, this “radical feminist retelling” juxtaposes the author’s dystopia with the utopian dream of four 21st-century women. “The apocalypse is coming,” they warn, as they stock up on everything from onions to tampons. Taking responsibility for the survival of the species, they also store small jars of sperm in their bunker.
Once the women go beyond the survivalist stage, they put their minds to the kind of future they want to see for their imagined “people’s baby”. Going several steps further than Wells, Amy Conachan, Melanie Jordan, Gabrielle Monica Hughes and Itxaso Moreno imagine a society not just without class divisions but without discrimination of any kind. Theirs would be a world where everyone is respected equally.
The uneven show reveals its devised origins. It is hard to know, for example, what to make of the extraneous “baby Olympics” sketch involving races between pregnant women. But the production also has a lively, enquiring spirit. Even as the women draw up their blueprint, they see the impossibility of such idealism working in practice – yet they understand the value of asking the question. If we don’t want to end up as Eloi and Morlocks, what do we want?
