To Boldy Go...

Back in 2017, a group of us scrambled together an entry to the local one act play festival hosted at the Blackmore Theatre in Exmouth. The play chosen was David Tristam’s Brenton vs Brenton, a wacky spoof of Dallas. Rehearsals were limited. Time was short. But, thanks to a talented cast that had a knack for comedy, we cleaned up shop, claiming first place in the competition, and a number of other trophies along with it.

But the Blackmore was just the beginning; just the first round in a much larger competition: The All-England Theatre Festival. We were through to the quarter finals. Funnily enough, that year, by sheer chance, the quarter finals were likewise hosted by the Blackmore theatre, and so, roughly a month later, we returned, and did the whole thing all over again.

We went on to the semi-finals, but unfortunately, the winning streak ended there. That however, is a different story. The one I’m telling now starts in the same place all great adventures do… the tavern. Rewind back to our victory in the quarters, and there we are, celebrating in the pub, contemplating whether it is either a brilliant or terrible idea to try and drink champagne out of the trophy, when suddenly, it comes to me there and then. The bridge of the Enterprise would make a really great set for a play!

Now, a bit of context: the reason this thought came to me was because of a gag we had in Brenton vs Brenton. Due to the play having to go on the road, the set had to be limited and creative. The entirety of Brenton was set in an office. Our set therefore consisted of a desk, a couple of chairs, and most importantly of all, a set of doors on castors. Initially, the doors were a simple solution to the problem of having to hang a door in a frame that could be transported between different locations. However, as rehearsals got underway, the actors quickly realised that the doors could be freewheeled around in all manner of ways for comedic effect.

Sliding doors used to comedic effect… you can probably see where the connection was made. Thus, the idea came to me, almost fully formed: a Star Trek spoof based loosely off the original TV series with a full on 60’s cheap campy sci-fi vibe. Thus, Space Tour was born.

The characters were already there: Captain Cook, the Kirk stereotype who was more focussed on seducing alien woman than actually carrying out his officer’s duties, the character taking the extra Zap Brannigan leap into pervy territory. (At the time of writing I had little idea that the Harvey Weinstein allegations would coincide quite perfectly with the performance, adding extra topical credence to the gag.)

Then, there was Dr. Mandroid, the android medical officer based off of The Next Generation’s Data, so cold and robotic in his mannerisms that his bedside manner was non-existent. I needed a straight man to play opposite Cook, one who could also take on the role of action hero amongst the crew; and so arose Commander William Striker, a competent first officer based around (you guessed it) William Riker, always desperately fighting against the Captain’s incompetence to keep the ship running as smoothly as possible.

Lieutenant Nichelle Aloha, modelled after Uhura of the Original Series, serves as the ship’s translator and the object of the Captain’s desire, forever rebuffing his repeated unwanted advances after a one-time lapse of judgment on her part. And then of course, there came the ship’s chief engineer, an Irishman by the name of Patrick O’Connell-Fitzmurphy, a parody of Scotty.

Finally, the only character that remained was the ship’s pilot, who unlike the rest of the crew, was not based off any character from Star Trek. I had a specific group of actors in mind for whom I was writing the roles, and nothing that already existed quite seemed to fit, and so, Private Haruka Fukumi was born. A young naïve alien with special needs who got her job due to the equal opportunities recruitment quotas of Space Fleet, her character leaning heavily on the age-old sexist joke that women can’t drive.

So that was the foundation: a set of sliding doors with a mind of their own, and the rough outline of a wacky and somewhat incompetent crew. But where did I go next? I’ve always thought of myself as funny, although I’m sure plenty of people would attest otherwise, but I had never, up until that point at least, written too much in the way of comedy. My work always has jokes in it, jokes that more often than not tend to land. I’d even written a few parody articles for my university’s student newspaper. But a whole play centred around gags… Where do you start?

I wanted it to be fast paced—one of those plays where they’ve already set up the next joke by the time you’ve stopped laughing at the last. One where things are set up cleverly in advance, with payoffs scattered throughout. Hopefully, I succeeded in that, but back beforehand, when the pen had never touched paper, I wasn’t quite sure where to begin.

So what did I do? What any self-respecting author / comedian does: I bought a moleskine. A little red one to be exact, that fit nicely in my pocket. I kept it on me for a good month or two, jotting down jokes whenever I thought of them. I’m one of those people that can’t help laughing at my own jokes, and so from time to time, I’d spontaneously erupt into laughter when I thought of a cracker, occasionally soliciting odd looks from people around me when I did so. In their defence, I must have come across as a right lunatic!

I also spent a fair amount of time watching Star Trek and sci-fi in general. The best way to parody something is to think critically about it. As soon as you realise who ridiculous something truly is, it becomes a heck of a lot easier to start poking fun at it. Of course, it was all done out of love. I know how absurd some sci-fi is, but god damn do I love it!

So, a few months of penning down jokes here and there and watching Star Trek on Netflix—as far as research goes, it was definitely the least laborious writing project I’ve undertaken. Then came what most people would consider the hardest part of the entire project: actually writing the damned script!

People who watched the finished project on stage often ask me how long it took to write. I can’t peg down an exact amount of time for how long I spent doing research, but the reality is, writing the script took barely any time at all. Two days. Twelve to sixteen hours total, with all the usual procrastination that comes with sitting down to write factored in. The script is only one act, so it clocks in at about 10,000 words.

Now, 5,000 words a day might seem a bit extreme for some people, but I’ve done 10,000 in a day once when I was finishing off the first draft of Conflux. If I have done all the necessary prep and planning, I can turn out quite a lot of matter in a single day. And for the case of Space Tour, I had a good percentage of the jokes already thought out. The rest came to me whilst I was writing. It was mostly just a case of figuring out the order of everything. Oh… and the plot.

It might seem a bit weird that the plot wasn’t planned out before I started writing, but the truth is, Space Tour doesn’t really have one. It’s a series of comedic situations that string together nicely, with the appropriate pay off at the end. Captain Cook is searching for the planet of super sexy virgins so he can boldly go where no man has gone before, and along the way they run out of fuel. Things continued to go wrong in an ever-escalating series of situations, mostly all caused by the captain’s incompetence, before eventually they do finally find the planet of super sexy virgins; but of course, it being a Star Trek spoof, not all is as it seems.

So, with the script done, its time for it to see the light of day. I get together the cast, (in the pub no less) none of them having much of an idea of what I was about to present them, and we have a readthrough. There are a good number of chuckles, but I quickly realised that half the jokes aren’t landing. It’s a stageplay, and though a good majority of the visual gags are detailed in the stage directions, they have to be seen and heard in order to be understood.

Fast-forward to rehearsals and the physical comedy starts to come into play. The cast are beginning to get it, but still, without all the lights and sounds, only I truly realise what the end product will be. Fortunately, I’m directing. I have a vision. I know what I want. And little by little we are getting there.

I quickly realise it is down to me to do tech. I sourced all the sound effects and plugged them all into Q-Lab. All in all, there are near enough two hundred sound cues! TWO HUNDRED! For a 45-minute ONE ACT!? It’s pretty full on. I’m directing, trying to pay attention to each actor and their performance, coordinating everything on stage, whilst also concentrating desperately hard on not missing my cues.

We get close to the competition and I’m beginning to think we’ve got a flop on our hands. It’s coming together, but its still not clicked; its too far off from where it needs to be. We get to the dress rehearsal. We’d decided to stage it as a full-on performance in front of an audience. Then disaster strikes. Someone drops out… on the night of the dress rehearsal! Not only were they supposed to come on dressed as a giant lizard for a choreographed fight scene in the play’s climax, but that same person is one half of the set of sliding bridge doors. Not only do they have to know everyone’s entry and exit, but the doors are a gag in and of themselves, forever malfunctioning whenever the captain tries to walk through them.

We pull someone in last minute to help with the doors, cueing them from backstage, and switch a few lines around to allow one of the other cast members to suit up as the lizard. And… well, things go off without a hitch. It’s a roaring success. The audience are in hysterics. They love it! Somehow, against all odds, we pull it off. And I breathe a sigh of relief in the knowledge that it is actually funny. I was petrified that it would just fall flat.

And so, we arrive at the night of the actual performance. Different theatre. Different audience. Different vibe. The cast are nervous. The adjudicator is watching. The performance is good, but not quite flawless; there’s the odd forgotten line here and there, an occasional butchered punchline. The audience chuckle now and then, but they are worryingly quiet. It doesn’t help that it comprises mostly of the other theatre groups we’re competing against.

A few nights later, the play festival is wrapping up. We are sat at the awards ceremony, and unlike the previous year, we are not cleaning up shop. It would be nice to win, but the prize I really want is the one for best original script. But I don’t get it. Someone else does. The adjudicator makes it clear that when she read the script, she had the same problem that some of the cast did: she didn’t quite get it. So much of it is visual, that for some people, it doesn’t quite translate on the page.

Our shoulders begin to slump as we figure it is going to be a disappointing night. The runners up are announced and we pretty much figure that’s that. The adjudicator begins to announce the winners. Her words, “Well… it had to be Space Tour!”

Sorry… what!? We won!? We head up onto the stage to collect the prize, shell-shocked; confounded and gobsmacked that we’d claimed first place for the second year running with the most unlikely of entries. And yet, against all odds, we’d done it!

Turns out, the play was so ambitious, so technical, so strange and unusual, and so well performed by the cast, that by the very nature of the competition, it just had to win. It may not have been to the adjudicator’s tastes, but it was the best play in the competition. We were through to the next round, this time heading straight for the semi-finals! Only… yeah… about that.

Turns out, several of the cast members, Captain Cook amongst them, weren’t available on the dates of the next round. I contemplated every option, shuffling players around, even stepping in myself to play Cook—heck, I pretty much knew all of his lines! But, in the end, there wasn’t enough time. We reluctantly pulled out of the competition, and that was the end. Who knows what might have happened? Maybe we’d have crashed and burned in the next round, but I have an inkling that we might just have done it.

Regardless, we’ll never know. The years went by. A global pandemic hit. But through it all, I couldn’t stop thinking what a shame it was, that Space Tour only ever had the two outings it got. It deserved more.

And so, this year, we brought it back. This time for a full run. Much of the original actors reprised their roles, with a few key characters recast. Now, we had a theatre all to ourselves, and so, over the course of three months, with the help of a few others, I hand built the set of a spaceship bridge.

We did everything on a non-existent budget, but with the extra rehearsal time we had this time around, we delivered a finished product that easily surpassed the original production. Space Tour ran from June 6th to 11th at the Salterton Playhouse. And though it was far from a sell-out run, the audience loved it, so much so that another local group have expressed an interest in putting it on themselves!

In eighty years, the Salterton Drama Club has never staged anything quite like it. Nor have any of the other local theatre groups. Though I am sure there are other plays out there that bear some similarity, none are ever staged in this small corner of the world. Space Tour is utterly bizarre and zany, and truly unique. Pun intended, it is out of this world. It wasn’t an easy road getting it to the stage. It was risky, and at oft-times met with fierce resistance. But it was hard fought for.

And so, unlike most of my blog posts, I’d like to finish with a message. Never be afraid to go against the grain. If you believe in something, fight for it. At times, it might seem like you are the only person who has faith in your work, but if you truly love something, I promise you, other people out there will too!

The full script is available for download at https://www.drhillauthor.com/spacetour and in the coming weeks a video of one of our later rehearsals will be uploaded.