Theatre night:Radio.

"I wish I was a spaceman. The fastest guy alive. I'd fly you round the universe in Fireball XL5. Way out in space together, conquerors of the sky. My heart would be a fireball, a fireball, every time I gazed into your starry eyes" - Fireball XL5, Barry Gray.

 

Barry Gray's theme tune to Fireball XL5 and Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman are the songs that punctuate the Al Smith written, Josh Roche directed, and Adam Gillen starring play Radio that I got myself along to see at the Arcola in Dalston last night. A play that purports to be about "love, memory and spaceships".

All undoubtedly big and important things - but it did seem to be, or trying to be at least, about something much more. During a seventy five minute monologue, Gillen as Charlie Fairbanks Jnr tells us his life story, his father's life story, his mother's life story, and even one of his grandparent's life stories for good measure. 

It's a lot to take in and though it's fascinating in places there were other times when I'd drift off and start wondering what I'd have for dinner later or start daydreaming about upcoming holidays! Which was more than a little awkward as Gillen, an amazing performer it has to be said, has a tendency to drill in individual audience members, catch their eye, and speak as if directly to them.

I was sat in the front row so it happened often to me. First time I nearly spoke back, surely poor etiquette! Soon I learned just to listen as Gillen told a tale of flags, magicians, homelessness, and the American aviation industry in which it seemed likely, if not completely apparent, that Fairbanks Jnr was supposed to represent a personification of America herself.

Fairbanks Jnr was born slap bang in the middle of the twentieth century (and grew up wanting to be an astronaut, like many his age). Not just that, he grew up slap bang in the geographical centre of America, in the small city of Lebanon, Kansas. When his family move to the slightly larger, and much colder, Rugby, North Dakota it's around the time Alaska is made a state so the centre of America changes again and the Fairbanks family find themselves, once more, in the middle of everything.

Later on, Hawaii is admitted to the union so the centre is now in the Pacific Ocean and, you guessed it, the Fairbanks family move, ok not to a floating home in the sea, but to San Francisco in California where, due to the high mortality rate of soldiers during the Vietnam War, our protagonist's father gets rich making flags to drape over dead soldier's coffins.

In this, and other sections, you can see attempts to show, and critique, how America went from a booming, forward looking, country sending young men into space to explore those final frontiers to an inward looking, militaristic, nation that, instead, sent those young men to their deaths on foreign fields.

Leaving aside the fact that American military aggression was already well established before the moon landings, my concern was that the satire was sketched so lightly it never really bit hard enough (like, for instance, in Ivo van Hove's confusing but powerful The Damned (which I saw recently at The Barbican). That's fair enough. The budget and cast size are completely incomparable (Gillen has to make do with a tape recorder, a selection of jackets, a couple of chairs, and what looks like some misshapen hammock strung across the stage).

But what was disappointing is that, despite a couple of funny moments (for me anyway, others in the audience were howling like horny hyenas), one or two genuinely great lines, and a couple of mildly moving passages, this play that spanned the fifties through to the seventies from the presidency of Harry Truman to that of Gerald Ford, ultimately left me a little frustrated.

Despite a great central performance I just wasn't as gripped as I'd have liked to have been. I'd loved my visit to the great little Arcola (and I enjoyed my Big V dog and Brooklyn lager in The Diner nearby afterwards) but I came away thinking that if space is the place this rocket was, sadly, manned more by Mr Spoon on his way to Button Moon than Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11. I feel harsh in this assessment because it was such a valiant effort and because of that I'll hand out a rare mark out of ten. Six. Six out of ten. Which is still better than 5-4-3-2-1, eh!