Pioneer, Shoreditch Town Hall, London - review

For a piece which aims to be a celebration and an exhortation, from a company whose keynote is an awareness of science's integral role in our culture, Pioneer is puzzlingly unfocused in both form and content. The story of Earth's second private-enterprise mission to Mars circa 2030 weaves together events at mission control on the red planet itself, where the previous mission appears to be unravelling, and in Siberia, where a pair of brothers are taking a road trip to various locations of significance in the 20th-century space race.

Jack Lowe's production for Curious Directive is thoughtful, fluidly staged and inventive in its use of both physical and multimedia resources (thanks to Cecilia Carey's set and Jasmine Robertson's video design). One can see how the company has come to be described as a low-budget (which does not mean shoddy) version of Complicite. It is in the crystallising of ideas into a coherent, dynamic whole that they fall down.

The gradual decline into hallucination and paranoia of Martian resident Imke (Flora Denman) ought to be compellingly poignant; the imperatives driving Shari and Rudi (Avita Jay and Dudley Rees) to keep the project on track at mission control ought to be suspenseful; the journey of Ivan and Alyosha (Jesse Briton and James Hardy) should provide a viewpoint with which we can identify. Instead, the brothers obsessively recount potted histories of the Soviet space programme, which they obviously know already but need to be imparted to us, as if Dan Brown had taken to science fiction.

Imke meanwhile lies around and mumbles, which may explain why she has never noticed key facts of physics that would reveal the Capricorn One-type secret shared by those at control. Nor, despite numerous references to the disappearance of Imke's husband Oskar, are we given any idea why he has vanished.

Lowe and company seem, on the one hand, to take the wonders of science for granted and on the other, to need to spell out minutiae for us. The result is stodgy at both ends without being firm in the middle. In space, no one can hear you shrug.

curiousdirective.com/thenextshow

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