Cheap jokes about Uranus aside, have you ever tried flirting with a planet? Thought not. But it’s a challenge posed to psychologist Kris Kelvin (Polly Frame) by the ghost of a former boyfriend Ray (Keegan Joyce) on board a space station overlooking the titular planet which, covered in ocean, performs a figure-of-eight orbit around both a red and blue sun.

For ghost, read a visitor from our dreams, a copy of a loved one, who looks and sounds human but is composed entirely of water. And for planet, read a giant ball of consciousness, “a cosmic yogi”, which according to the video diaries of the deceased commander Dr Gibarian (Hugo Weaving) is observing as much as it is being observed, testing as much as it is being tested. But is it benign or malevolent? And what is its purpose, what is it asking for?

“A degree of strangeness has become normal for us,” says Dr Sartorius (Jade Ogugua) about the difficult scientific mission which she and her remaining colleague Dr Snow (Fode Simbo) are approaching the end of. To which someone adds, later, “This is a lot to take in.” Two statements which crystalise the beautiful enigma that is David Greig’s adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same name which under the direction of Matthew Lutton, who employs similar cinematic techniques to his chilling production of Picnic At Hanging Rock, is as visually striking as it is dramatically charged. Not to mention, surprisingly droll: “She’s not a scientist,” remarks Dr Sartorius, “she’s a psychologist.” Ba-dum tish!

The premise may be simple, but interpretations are numerous – the mark of a great play. Though grief, loneliness and love are the gravitational forces which ebb and flow in the heart of the protagonist and, by extension, humanity whose fragility is reduced to the profound: “This is me, now, trapped in skin, alone.”

Rarely have sound, set and lighting designs been in such close harmony with text and direction: Hyemi Shin’s all-white space station, flooded with a rainbow of colour by Paul Jackson and reduced to a blackout by the rise and fall of a single curtain, combining with Jethro Woodward’s soundscape to create a spectacle which, in a co-production between the Lyceum, Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith, is every bit as arresting as the unseen planet.

Polly Frame is excellent as the troubled Kris Kelvin who seduced by Keegan Joyce’s carefree Ray defies Jade Ogugua’s voice of reason in Dr Sartorius to engage with her subject on an emotional (and sexual) level. An act which sends Fode Simbo’s measured Dr Snow into a fit of incredulity when he learns that she neither photographed nor recorded her observations. But having escaped the “prisons” of time and place to savour the here and now, it is, she concludes, a risk worth taking in order to explore the conundrum of existence: “Why am I here?”

Peter Callaghan
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