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{Spoiler - click to view}Act 1 is, by necessity, seemingly inconsequential and everyday. About halfway through we start to get the sense something is not quite as it seems and there's a freaky punch just before the interval but it is only in the much more fluid, unpredictable second half that we start to grasp quite what we were watching in the first half and the emotional impact in the final few minutes is very impressive.

Four people are stranded on a space station on Pluto, and grow crazy, start having hallucinations, and die. The plot is wafer-thin. Which is fine, as it's clearly supposed to be a psychological exploration of loneliness, guilt and anxiety. But to pull that off you need really deep characterisation and amazing dialogue, and this had neither. The characters are written fairly flatly and do not really grow or change over the course of the play. Gilda starts out a tense ball of anxiety, and finishes a tense ball of anxiety. If she has any personality traits other than 'anxious and uptight' they were not apparent. It also annoyed me how stereotypical the characters were: The white posh uptight bitch. The mouthy and overtly sexual working class girl. The Indian male maths geek. The working class, regional-accented LAAAAAAAADDD who walks around in his underwear. Ray was the only character who came across as more complex. I'll give fair credit, his scene with the bird calls was affecting and subtle.

I did like the stuff with the 'fifth' crew member and the slow realisation that she was not who she appeared to be, although it's such a ludicrously overused scifi trope and I don't care if it's not supposed to be a scifi play, or if it was an attempt to subvert or deconstruct a trope (it didn't feel like it was, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt), I still couldn't help but think, "I've seen this exact storyline on every trashy one-season scifi show and Star Trek did it better. Hell even Torchwood did it better." It felt like watching scifi written by someone utterly unfamiliar with scifi. Like the details about how the earth had died. Intriguing but if you're going to use details that are in themselves well-worn tropes you need to work to make them not just repeating cliches. And I'm speaking as someone who loves apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic themes. Stuff like Far Away and the monologues from Escaped Alone both give me chills. But all the Last Trees stuff here just made me think, "The animated kiddie movie series Ice Age had literally that exact plot." Must try harder.

At the interval I felt that I had a reasonable idea of what was going on: "Okay so they're seeing visions of this girl, and she's either a hallucination (a shared hallucination, or one that one character is having and projecting onto the others) or they're literally being haunted by the ghost of a chronic masturbator."

Because the play starts with them in such a heightened state of anxiety, there wasn't anywhere for them to go in the second half except louder and more ostentatiously CRAZY. I wanted the second half to delve further into Mattie's character and the nature of the hallucinations and was disappointed. I enjoyed the possible ambiguity (are we supposed to take the frankly Eastenders-style revelation at face value, or did Gilda hallucinate her entire relationship with Mattie?) but I'm not sure if that was intentional. I'd actually much prefer the latter. I overheard someone say, "So the whole thing was about a woman going crazy because she had Working Mother Guilt?" I hope not. Does Gilda need a reason to go crazy? More of a reason than being stranded and left to die? And does her reason have to do with her maternal status?

In hindsight the Mattie mystery has stayed with me which is the sign of a good play. I'll give credit for that. Wasn't sure how well it fitted in with the rest of the play. The more I think about it the more I can see its potential. I think the problem really is that it's just not well-written. It felt like a first draft. The main flaw is the dialogue, which is so very bad. Cheesy and puerile. The 'joke' that made the audience laugh the hardest the night I saw it was one crew member looking over the shoulder of another who's working out some calculations, and saying, "Your maths is gash." This is literally the best joke in the entire play. The part that made me laugh hardest was when, during Gilda's descent into madness, a 8ft long dead bird is dropped onto the stage (a reference to the previously mentioned worldwide extinction of all birds decades earlier). The problem is, a giant stuffed parrot suddenly kerplunking down out of nowhere is funny. It just is. Ditto black-clad crewmembers scurrying on trying to discreetly drag the bloody thing offstage, silently swearing, while the scene continued around them. Long live the dead parrot!

{Spoiler - click to view}The relationship between the central character and whatever she is hallucinating/living through appear to highlight elements of her fears and history. The colleague/lover and their absence, the fear of dying, nature turning against us, having no time left. These are applicable to anyone but they are put in a context where the world is dying and where the old were responsible for that death.

You won't see that if you don't want to. If you want to, you will.