Review: Elon Musk - Lost In Space

Parodying people such as Elon Musk is not a trivial task. He already seems like a cartoon. Musk says and does ridiculous things in real life. Leaning yet more in that direction demands plutonium grade material so as not to replicate the version who frequently appears in the news. Elon Musk: Lost In Space is pencil lead grade.

The premise of David Morley’s play (directed by John Nicholson) is that Elon Musk has an ego so large, he has set off on a mission to Mars. This might seem like a large step for a playwright but when you factor in that Musk is the main shareholder in Space X, the premise is far from fetched. This perhaps is the first indication that the material is going to lean heavily on the already obvious. Musk (Ben Whitehead), accompanied by M-UTHA (Sarah Lawrie as a gold lamé C-3PO-esque AI robot), is playing a dated video game during blast-off. From the outset M-UTHA is presented as more intelligent than the boorishly, idiotic Musk. The whole play is one-note and the jokes so utterly predictable that it is hard to believe they are little more than the outcome of a hurried improv-workshop. When the first fart-joke in space appears within minutes of blast-off then ‘Houston, we have a problem’.

I could go into detail on the utterly bizarre imitations of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Kevin Bridges (!) or the inclusion of video footage of Patrick Moore (you really have to be a certain vintage to get these references) but what would be the point? The dreariest thing is not references to ‘Woke Mind Virus’, it’s the fact that Elon Musk: Lost In Space stretches to a time-warping 75 minutes. Not a pico-second suggested a runtime longer than any other play at EdFringe.

Whitehead and Lawrie do their very best with the seriously limited material they have been given but, in the end, this really is a case of a groundhog thinking it’s a rocket.

Elon Musk: Lost In Space continues its run at Space@Surgeons’ Hall until 23rd August.