May the Forth be with you! Minor Star Wars character Admiral Gial Ackbar has picked an auspicious week to grace Wellington with his ‘hour’.

The leader of the Mon Calamari rebels, it was in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) that he immortalised himself as a meme in cyberspace by saying, “It’s a trap!” But now it’s a whisky trap he has sunk into – and I’m surprised writer/ performer Anya Tate-Manning has not given us Ackbar’s cover the Brecht/Weill ‘Alabama Song’ (“Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar!”). Instead the old salt regales us with a very long version of The Village People’s ‘In The Navy’ by way of kicking off his ‘hour’ – which in fact is just forty minutes.

The mask, crafted by Jon Coddington, is work of art. Unlike a commedia mask, it allows no part of Tate-Manning’s face (eyes, mouth, teeth, tongue, chin) to show and yet, thanks to her body-language, it does appear to change expression in accord with Ackbar’s mood swings.

It does, however, muffle her voice causing all in our party of four (including two in their mid-twenties) to miss quite a lot of his monologue. If this show is to go any further, a judiciously place head-mic needs to be employed.

Initially the ‘gag’ seems to be that Ackbar is delivering a stock-standard stand-up show to the Star Wars gang. Having checked to see if there are any Wookies, Ewoks, Mon Calamari, etc in tonight, he checks off the things he might talk about: the flag referendum, Air B&B, terrorism … but it remains just a list. “What else?” More likely topics get a mention – the American primaries, etc – but nothing is explored. Perhaps this is a ‘meta comedy’ thing.

Resorting to the bottle of whiskey stage left becomes a thing, and there is something about the way it pours that becomes a running gag. Although he loosens up and is given to singing old faves – ‘What A Wonderful World’; ‘That’s Amore’; ‘Fly Me To The Moon’; ‘Chandelier’ – and dancing nimbly, he doesn’t get drunk, or not as we know it. Maybe it’s different for bipedal amphibian aliens.

Ackbar’s work-in-progress memoir offers another dimension of content and here Star Wars aficionados may feel rewarded with bits of esoterica. Glimpses of promise emerge from mentions of the nightmare screams of the hundreds he has killed, his lost dreams of being a dancer, his dead friends adrift in the infinite loneliness of the stars …

“What if we’re not the good guys?” is a powerful question. Are we into allegory territory here, channelling what should concern the leaders of the so-called free world? But no, these moments and questions have just created another list of potential themes that are yet to be developed into a show worth seeing.

Dramaturgical and directorial input are sorely needed. Aside from the muffled voice, the perfomative elements, such as they are, are well executed but as a whole it falls well short of its potential: less than the sum of its parts.

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