If Sometimes I Don’t Like Yellow is somewhat incomprehensible, then the late show at BATS – The Black Hole Menagerie – is even more so. 

Subtitled A Science Fiction Musical – 2010: A Sexual Odyssey,it presumably models itself on cult-type musicals like The Rocky Horror Show but misses the mark badly.

Travelling through outer space towards a black hole is Scarlett Lashes (Jess Haugh) with her sidekick T2500 Android (Virginia Frankovich). Why they are on this journey and its purpose is never made clear as Scarlett spends most of her time singing and dancing about a love affair with Newspaper Boy – if squawking off key and flaying arms and legs can be called singing and dancing. 

While Frankovich makes some attempt at a theatrical performance with her appallingly android like dialogue, Haugh’s laid back, low key style and uninspiring voice becomes almost insulting to a paying audience, making this show one of the low points of this year’s Fringe Festival.
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In space nobody can hear you scream.  And there is nobody to come to your rescue either. And thus you are trapped in one full hour of The Black Hole Menagerie, which is, without doubt, the worst science fiction sex musical that I have ever been subjected to.

The piece is styled as a B-grade sci-fi film, after the fashion of Return to the Forbidden Planet – you know, the kind of thing that gets a cult status and people watch it just because it is so cheap and bad.  But there is bad-trashy-cult-sensation, and then there is this. 

Scarlett Lashes (Jess Haugh who is also writer, composer and presumably driving force behind this travesty) awakes aboard a space ship travelling toward the black hole at the centre of Sagittarius A.  She is in the company of a T2500 Android and the pair is on a mission to ‘reach the singularity/ and let go of reality’.  Or something?

It’s pretty thin plot-wise. Most of the story-telling seems to revolve around Scarlett recounting her sexual adventures with ‘Newspaper Boy’, a character from the back-story who never appears on the stage.  

Now plot isn’t everything, especially in an electro-glam musical, and I could let the shakiness of the story go if the performances were strong.  They are not.  Jess Haugh has the majority of the stage time and her line delivery is appalling, her voice is weak and her uninspired dance moves seem to be made up on the spot.  At no point is there any evidence of blocking.

Her side kick Virginia Frankovich, as the android nicknamed ‘Tinker’, also struggles through her script, though she at least has the excuse that she is hampered by lines of dialogue that are incredibly badly written (think android bad grammar clichés in the style of: ‘I human feelings can compute not. Programming not designed for such understanding to reach’). 

The high point of the play is when ‘Tinker’ picks up the mic to have a song and the audience clap with relief that is not going to just be Scarlett prancing around for another interminable number. Not that I’m saying the song was good, but it was better.  The robot is cute and charismatic.  She should have more songs.

Musician Bede MacLaurin makes a single appearance as the supreme spiritual adviser Cosmic Ray and well, he is an enigmatic man of mystery.  At this point I still had hopes for the show. I thought, oh this is going to turn into a send up a la The Mighty Boosh, it is actually a really dry pisstake and they are laughing at us.  But no.  Oh no.  They take themselves far too seriously for that. 

Okay, but this can’t all be a huge negative rant.  The costumes were quite good.  Tinker’s boots were enviable, Cosmic Ray’s hat was actually splendidly majestically funny and while the choices were weird they were all in keeping with each other and whole the B grade sci-fi flick aesthetic.  As was the set: a series of sparkly and trashy ‘hibernation chambers’, a random be-sequinned oven at the back, and two plastic footstools that still had their price stickers on them.  The lighting design embraced the use of coloured gels without holding back.

And that is the other thing, really.  For a show that is supposedly about sex it contains no embracing and no sex whatsoever.  Scarlett prances about the stage talking about the sex she has had with various other characters THAT WE NEVER SEE and REFUSES to have any sexual relations with the only other character actually on the stage.  No boundaries are pushed.  No avenues are explored.  It is not racy.  It is tame. It isn’t even fun or funny. 

In a nutshell, this was one of the most self-indulgent pieces of theatre I have ever seen.  Not recommended.
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