Zoe McGee and Jordan Saxby, and The writer-directors of Broken Stars are certainly not faint-hearted. When writing new material, the temptation is always to play for laughs, such is the typical Anglophone audience’s almost visceral reaction to earnestness unleavened by comedy (think History Boys for an excellent recent example). More than that, Broken Stars sells itself as sci-fi and unashamed of it. Somehow earnestness is even harder to take if it refers to events that are not only fictional, but highly improbable or even absurd. Nuclear melt-down at Fukushima is scary and serious stuff; the same thing happening on the planet Nebulon IV somewhat less so. In short, the potential cringe-factor is huge.
 That said, Broken Stars itself is undoubtedly a competent and thoughtful production and doesn’t deserve to be dismissed for attempting what is perhaps impossible anyway. A common way (perhaps the only way) of legitimising Serious Sci-fi is to set the action in a dystopian future, which Broken Stars did with some simple but effective set-design: knackered old furniture and the like. Thereafter, the action followed two separate arcs: the over-arching one in which our brave band of morally ambiguous (and sexually charged) counter-cultural revolutionaries study the video tapes (futuristic and retro all at the same time) portraying a couple belonging to a previous civilization known as the ‘Constructionists’. Which would indicate that the present oppressive government are the Deconstructionists, though the methodological implications of this aren’t really worked through. Ben and Alice (JY Hoh and Sophie Ablett), the couple seen in the tape follow a fairly standard love story: boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy and girl escape oppression on a spaceship, girl turns into wheedling passive-aggressive bitch then dies, boy resurrects girl as somewhat-more-likeable hologram; it’s all textbook stuff. In fact, the love story is the most convincingly written and performed part of what is generally a competent performance all round. When we cringe in these scenes, it’s with our hero the hologram scientist, who generally re-defines the phrase ‘under the thumb’.
 Finally, this is a serious play and hence has a serious message: namely that individuals are more important than ideologies, that the counter-culture can be as ambiguous as the supposedly repressive state. This all comes in something of a rush at the end of the play, helped along by the convenient sci-fi deus ex machine of a nuclear explosion. It’s quite a mature message to end on, and one with which this reviewer has some sympathy. It’s much the same sort of thing Boris Pasternak was trying to do in Doctor Zhivago. The problem is, however, that Pasternak could set his story against the epic backdrop of the Russian Civil War. Trying to achieve the same pathos in science fiction is much, much harder (as anyone who’s had to watch a Christmas special of Dr Who will readily understand) and, unfortunately, the almost inevitable result is cringing embarrassment. Nevertheless, for all these caveats, Broken Stars deserves some serious credit for conceiving of a gutsy idea and executing it with competence throughout.
2.5 STARSÂ
