In this case the reference is to the stage play by Frank Gauntlett performed at the NIDA playhouse in Kensington, NSW. It is a one-man show with Mark Lee, directed by Gareth Boylan. The season is 11 April to 2 May 2018.
In short, we liked it.
The adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel is coherent and well written. The set design stimulates the imagination but is understated. Much is accomplished with lighting and sound. Though most of all there is the performance that carries the day.
Our traveller starts out a smug, erudite, confident Victorian know-it-all and ends a broken man. In between he knows wonder, fear, love, remorse, terror, and regret.
The Year 802,791 A.D. shows the devolution of human kind with the layabout fruit-eating Eloi and the dark meat-eating Molochs. In Wells’s heavy hands this situation is the division between capital and labor carried to its logical conclusion.
Though quite how cannibalism fits into that equation is never made clear, nor how it is that the Eloi benefit from the labor of the Molochs.
That Eden might rest on slave labour is a recurrent theme in literature. There is a striking passage about this symbiotic relationship in Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ (1924) where the mutual dependence is made very clear without the didacticism of Wells.
It takes just over one hour, and was worth the bus ride virtually door-to-door on the 370.
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