Deeptime Atomic Waste Pleasure Party
★★★★☆ Mesmerising
theSpace Triplex (Venue 38): Fri 2 – Sat 10 Aug 2024
Review by Katrina Dixon
Deeptime Atomic Waste Pleasure Party, Elastic Fantastic’s immersive storytelling Fringe debut, is an impressive piece of multimedia sci-fi theatre.
This is a thought-provoking 50-minute show that packs in big themes, written and performed by dynamic ensemble founder Jake Mace and directed by Mike Dorey. Climate crisis, consent, how we’ll communicate to future generations about what we’ve done and the power of our bodies are all part of a story that’s about how we might change the story.
Jake Mace goes Deeptime. Pic: Elastic Fantastic
A pulsating mix of techno music, fractured visuals and dazzling Stranger Things-inspired sounds, all created by musician Ronan Goron and lighting and AV designer Callie O’Brien, fuels a fluid, vivid narrative.
The main story of a night out with friends and acquaintances in a techno club expands outwards into ever-more psychedelic strands as dystopian visions of past, future and other versions of the present flash through through Mace’s engrossing storytelling.
Mace’s character Rey is on the once-a-year night of hedonistic clubbing that is allowed in a near-future Edinburgh where you need not only your ID but your mandated geiger counter rather than a mobile phone when you go out. However, mysterious messages lead Rey away from the febrile dance floor and in pursuit of love to the ominous back rooms and hallways filled with harsh neon light and graffiti, and from letting go of anxiety to a purposeful mission about buried nuclear waste.
This is not the plac
“This is not the place” is the repeating portent, heard and seen, a call back both to the Talking Heads song from 1983, snatches of which we hear throughout, and the long-term warnings developed in the 1990s for future visitors to a nuclear waste site.
As Rey gets further from reality, the club setting intercuts deftly with snapshots of childhood, a 1980s nuclear protest site and an encounter with a radioactive cat in the desert.
Dancing the night away still has meaning as a safe space amid all this, but the end message seems to be that there’s so much more that’s possible, and the same is true of this theatre company, who should have a fantastic future.
Running Time: 50 minutes (no interval)
theSpace Triplex (Studio), Prince Philip Building, 19 Hill Place, EH8 9DP (Venue 38)
Friday 2 – Saturday 10 August 2024
Daily: 8.35pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Website: www.elasticfantastic.co.uk/
Instagram: @elasticfantasia
X: @elasticfantasia
Jake Mace goes Deeptime. Pic: Elastic Fantastic
ENDS
