Alone
Dancing through her daily duties, pilot Jessica Holland is a starwoman waiting in the sky to return home, tending to her plants and eating her cold noodles aboard the privately funded Lily of the Nile while Doctor Sarah Taylor does the real work, analysing the bacteria specimens obtained from Beta V to see whether they will indeed consume carbon dioxide as voraciously as she predicts.
The future of the Earth as a viable ecosystem dependent on the Purple Fields Project, the lives of Holland and Taylor are the more immediate concern; encountering an asteroid field, it becomes apparent that the Lily is of course, an undetected malfunction in the guidance system having led to the collision which has punctured the hull, precious irreplaceable oxygen bleeding out into the darkness between the stars…
Out of contact with Earth and beyond the space lanes with no hope of immediate rescue, Alone is written and directed by Luke Thornborough and stars Kat Glass and Courtney Bassett as the scientist and the pilot, both experts in their field who have pushed themselves to excel in their careers and sacrificed much to be where they are but are now subject to the cold equations of the hazards of interplanetary travel.
Initially lashing out at Holland whom she holds responsible for the oversight, when Taylor reframes the disaster as a problem to be solved her practical skills kick in but with the mission more important than either of them as individuals she is determined that the samples must survive even if one or both of them die, even going so far as to suggest that with the Lily inoperable a pilot is more expendable than the only expert on the bacteria, a conclusion Holland furiously rejects.
Told in a simple space, the workbenches of the lab and the control consoles of the Lily with netted storage areas below, a flickering light the only contact from a distant home neither may see again, from finding joy in simple pleasures through confrontations to confessions, Alone is an emotional and difficult journey towards acceptance of the inevitable carried by two excellent performances which becomes a genuine rarity, a Fringe show of extended duration which engages until the last breath.
Alone runs at Assembly at George Square until Monday 28th August
