Trouble On Planet Earth
The Border Project
Fringe factory Theatre
Crumpet Theatre
Until Sun 16 March


Here you'll find one of the funnest - and smartest - things to ever grace a stage in Adelaide - a choose-your-own-adventure play with 24 possible endings and god-knows how many possible scenes and narrative paths. And how does it work? Well, finding that out is half the fun, suffice to say 'choices' are derived from the audience democratically, via supercool little flashing devices.

A description of the story can't really go past the first scene for obvious reasons, though it's important enough - it's where the character which the audience actually inhabits, that's to say is, is described.

As such the whole thing, apart from being ridiculously fun and funny, is set up cleverly as a play on the you/'me' dynamic in modern commercial and political culture. Apart from the fact that you are the main character and you are doing the choosing, they cheekily reference you, the audience member, every chance they get in the same faux-personalised (and ridiculous) way we see every time we see some pensive advert telling us about the importance of individuality or our electronic device says 'hi!' to us. Appropriately their interface for doing this is an idealised female form projected on the screen above the stage, not only addressing you as if you were the only one in the audience, but doing so in classic sexy, faux-intimate fashion!

And characters and narrators plea directly with the audience at 'choice-points', appealing to social values and instinctive, selfish greed alternately in order sway voters between choices, which produces the same sort of uncommitted fickleness we often see in democratic culture but which is just pure fun in this context.

So great ideas, cheeky subversion, and all in a gloriously fun and accessible package - 'Trouble On Planet Earth' seriously kicks-ass! Don't just go see it, see it 24 times.

William McGinley