A Time Traveler’s Guide to the Present

It became known as “the iso signal,” driving anyone who heard it to isolate themselves from their friends and family, 85% of the population of Earth effected by it; stranger still, not only did the signal seem to emanate from deep space, Messier 104, the Sombrero Galaxy, but also from forty-one years in the future, the year 2063.

Summoned to the revered Society of Temporal Cosmopolites, Doug Harvey is informed that he has been requested by name to travel to the future to stop the signal at source; with no wife or children he has no grounds to refuse to participate, and fuelled by dark matter Project Leap Year is initiated but the road to the future is tied with the past, a puncture created in the fabric of space through which his memories bleed and manifest, learning about his own life and family even as he attempts to reach the future.

Written and performed by Doug Harvey, A Time Traveler’s Guide to the Present has taken three years to arrive at the Edinburgh Fringe, an ambitious idea presented as a convoluted narrative encompassing the fabric of spacetime and the connections of family which would be more effective with a greater budget to bring the production values in line with the artistic vision, the story desperately requiring a visual element to bring it to cosmic life.

Harvey playing all the parts save for some pre-recorded voices, he is Doug, the professor who gives lessons in basic cosmology, Cowboy, the ship’s artificial intelligence, and all the memories of past and future encounters, and with his expressive face he makes each of the characters distinct in a dynamic performance which suffers from the near-empty stage, the frustrations, longing and determination he generates boiling off into the vacuum.

A Time Traveler’s Guide to the Present runs at theSpace on North Bridge until Saturday 27th August

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