'Dark Sublime' review or 'Where shall we escape to?'

Dark Sublime, Michael Dennis
Trafalgar Studios, 28th June 2019
Written for The Guardian

It will come as no great shock to Star Trek: The Next Generation fans that Marina Sirtis, who played the much-loved Empath Deanna Troi, is an actor with real heart. It isn’t a faultless performance (sometimes the lines feel shaky) and Michael Dennis’s debut play is a fairly juddery, flippant one minute and extravagantly emotional the next. But Sirtis is genuinely moving as a near-forgotten actor whose star is on the wane, and Dennis writes passionately about television’s ability to transport us to another dimension and forget ourselves for a while.

Andrew Keates directs with a palpable sense of mischief and affection. Scenes from Dark Sublime, the sci-fi show that made Marianne famous, play out between the “real” scenes from Marianne’s later life. Tim McQuillen-Wright’s neatly drawn domestic set gives over to sci-fi silliness: the coffee table becomes a neon-lit control panel; the door turns into a rainbow-coloured robot gleefully voiced by Mark Gatiss, and Simon Thorp bounds about the stage, eyebrows wiggling and voice booming – our very silly sci-fi hero for the night.

There are some thoughtful performances nestling amid the giddy pastiche. Sirtis is best when she’s alone and still. The scene when Marianne sits outside a fan convention, mournfully munching on foam bananas, is awfully bittersweet and there’s a hard-earned affection between Marianne and lifelong best-friend Kate (Jacqueline King, truthful). Kwaku Mills plays superfan Oli with an intensely nervous energy. His whole body twists inwards, as if this lovely young gay man has spent an awful lot of time turning away from himself. Even when hanging out with his all-time hero Marianne, Oli types away on Twitter, struggling to detach himself from the alternate reality his phone provides.