Tycho: Mankind’s First Hotel on the Moon
It’s quite the view from the windows in the restaurant at the Tycho, billed as mankind’s first hotel on the Moon, the guests greeted by concierge Clavius and attended to by Mrs Crouch, the remote outpost serving as an escape from his fans for rock star Dave Flare, a clandestine meeting place for industrialist Wayne Bruce and cabinet minister Anthea Frost, and the chosen retirement place for widowed long-term resident Mrs Armstrong, full of stories.
The Moon, however, as cautioned by Heinlein many years ago, is a harsh mistress; the water electrolysis unit suffering a malfunction triggered by what is presumed to be a coronal mass ejection, without it the oxygen within the closed system cannot be replenished, and nor can a distress signal be sent, communications also having been knocked out, the brave staff attempting to keep things running and forestall panic as the end approaches, the inevitable outcome of the cold equations…
Performed by Jack Finnis, Billy Gregory, Benjamin Meacher, Anoushka Nairac, Orlando Alexander and Sophie Stevenson, also the musician behind the glorious Theremin versions of Fly Me to the Moon and Moon River which provide the soundtrack, Tycho: Mankind’s First Hotel on the Moon is written and directed by Alex Jones who also created the impressive backdrop of the hotel facilities, the lobby, restaurant, bedrooms and the Sputnik Spa, changing like the pages of a large-format comic book, the suburban dream of a 1950s home projected into the space age.
The forty-five minutes fragmented by more scene changes than are necessary as well as a brief frame which neither illuminates the larger story nor is informed by the events of it, seeming only to exist to tick the box of being “right on,” the dilemma is that of a children’s show, the reduced gravity all that can support belief in a lunar colony designed and built heated by combustion with no backups or failsafes that can go silent for two weeks with nobody on Earth becoming concerned, the ensemble doing their best but breathing thin atmosphere and the brilliantly staged sacrifice of one of the residents only serving to demonstrate the promise of what might have been.
