Review: War of the Worlds at the Liverpool Playhouse ***

HG Wells’ pioneering, prescient sci-fi classic has been presented in a myriad of ways over the 128 years since it was first published – from films and TV series (the Beeb’s 2019 version was partially shot in and around Liverpool) to Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio bulletin version which put the frighteners into listeners in New Jersey to Jeff Wayne’s musical spectacular with its giant hologram face and tripod fighting machine.

Wayne’s huge, immersive arena show underlines one of the challenges facing anyone who wants to tell the story on stage.

Where he went macro, Lancaster-based imitating the dog has gone micro, utilising its trademark tech-driven storytelling style to give its new theatrical touring production a cinematic scope.

This War of the Worlds is transposed to 1968, a year of great upheaval (and great tunes - if you’re in the theatre early you’ll get to enjoy The Doors and the Stones) with anti-war, anti-authority protests in the US and Paris and, closer to home, fears over mass immigration reaching their zenith in Enoch Powell’s hugely controversial ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

It’s not difficult to see the contemporary parallels imitating the dog is suggesting in its apocalyptic 2026 retelling. There’s no obliqueness or tricky nuance to negotiate.

The story’s ‘narrator’ is Will Travers (Gareth Cassidy), whom we meet lying in a London hospital bed after being badly wounded during an anti-migration protest and whom seemingly emerges from a coma to discover the world around him has been turned upside down.

Fires rage, and bricks and crushed vehicles lie strewn across a landscape of devoid of people; a red-tinged world of ghostly silences pierced by terrible sounds. It seems a strange ‘alien’ invasion has wrought widespread devastation.

Confused, intent on survival by whatever means and increasingly paranoid, Travers determines to avoid evisceration and make his way home to his wife Evie (Amy Dunn) in leafy Epsom and (yes, ironically) join a rumoured exodus of displaced people across the Channel to safety in France.

Along the way he happens upon Morgan Bailey’s cackling scouse soldier (Wells’ artilleryman), a deranged vicar (the curate – Bailey again) and a handful of wild-eyed, sinister survivors, played by Bonnie Baddoo. Who can Travers trust? Perhaps only himself.

Above: The 'Curate' (Morgan Bailey) and Will Travers (Gareth Cassidy). Top: A confused Travers in his hospital PJs. Photos by Ed Waring.

Is this punishment for his repugnant views? If so, will he take the opportunity to seek a redemption of sorts?

There’s also a plot twist which I won’t spoil here but which you may guess (I had a suspicion in the first few minutes which was ultimately borne out).

The risk with painting your chief protagonist as basically unlikeable and morally flawed is that you have no one for your audience to become emotionally engaged with or invested in.

Still, if the core narrative is emotionally bleak, it's told with extraordinary and impressive skill, the four-strong cast working together to create an intense and relentlessly complex – yet seamless - choreography of hand-held camera angles, myriad of small props and clever visual suggestion.

The set’s side and back walls are giant screens in Abbie Clarke’s tech-dominated design while the cinematic action takes place on a further screen suspended from the Playhouse’s pros arch. Meanwhile within this main space are two micro-sets which the cast employ in various feats of digital trickery to create strange internal and external worlds.

Their live storytelling is augmented by Simon Wainwright’s video and projection design and complemented by Andrew Crofts eerie lighting and James Hamilton and Rory Howson’s spectral sound. Strange days indeed.