On Thursday night I headed to Nottingham, towel in hand, to attend The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Show Live! The show featured the original cast from the radio play, Simon Jones, Geoff McGivern, Susan Sheridan and Mark Wing-Davey as well as many new talents playing younger characters and extras. The voice of the book was played by Christopher Timothy (different actors are taking on the role during the tour) and the entire night was whole lot of fun.
The show was a mix of live action and audio effects. The cast walked around holding their scripts as this was technically a radio play that we could see, but they were in costume; Arthur is his dressing gown and Zaphod with his extra head, cunningly portrayed by an extra running around behind him with the head mounted atop a long pole. Slartibartfast arrived on-stage looking for all the world like Obi-Wan Kenobi but the stand out "costume" of the night had to be the unhinged creature Agrajag who was played by an extra running about with a large black umbrella which was rapidly opened and closed to create the illusion of a circular fruit bat-like being flapping crazily around the stage. It was all very, very silly. Also very silly were the sing-a-longs such as the Sirius Cybernetics Corperation's theme song ("go stick your head in a pig!") conducted by a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser. Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz's poetry is another aspect of the show changing from night to night; the public were invited to submit their own terrible poems for the opportunity of having them included and a different one is read each night.
Although the cast had their scripts in hand there were dozens of mistakes when the actors got lost, read the wrong lines, stumbled over their own tongues or just plainly forgot that it was their line. Every mistake just added to the personality of the night. When the voice of the book made a mistake over a sentence multiple times, he just looked up at the giggling audience and said "you try it", sending the room into gales of laughter. There wasn't time to cover every part of the story during the show and some scenes were cut, however even these managed to be included as subtle in-jokes. Slartibartfast and Arthur had a discussion regarding how Arthur seemed to have somehow missed "entire chapters" of his life and later, Arthur suddenly announced he seemed "to be having a tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle". The cast paused expectantly as if awaiting the following computer game sequence but then carried on with the show. One of my favourite moments was when the Milliways waiter had to extract a tooth from an Algolian Suntiger, the latter played by a small tiger hand puppet as the two wrestled behind the sound effects booth.
If you won't be able to make it to the show (and live in the UK - sorry guys), then each night is being recorded and made available for download on the show's website for £9.99. You can also pick up the show merchandise which is available to ship worldwide and includes tour t-shirts featuring The Evildrome Boozarama and other famous drinking spots as well as a Babel Fish shaped USB stick.
