Ollie is a Martian. Or to go into a little more detail, he’s a man in a nifty blue track-suit with hair like Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future and who sounds like Jemaine Clement on helium. Also he’s from Mars, represented by a red ball with a heart on it. He’s come to Earth, a planet he doesn’t fully understand in search of… well, a few things, but mostly just to comprehend it. 

Ollie is a Martian is a show brimming with goodwill. It’s neither lewd, crude or in any way edgy (aside perhaps from one scene depicting a misunderstanding with a group of babies and a tube). It’s gently charming from the off as Ollie travels through a galaxy of corrugated iron stars on an Angry Birds moonhopper to some spacey lounge music. Despite its general lo-fi-ness, this is a strangely evocative version of space travel that calls to mind The Mighty Boosh, or possibly British children’s series Button Moon (Anyone? No? Okay, Moving on…) [More]

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The plain wooden stage floor is virtually bare, with just a few plastic stars dotted about on the surrounding black walls.  Above head height is a different story, thanks to Ruby Reihana-Wilson’s adroit lighting design whereby sparkly party lights, half bright white and half multicoloured, sprawl and sparkle across the ceiling to denote the sprawling galaxy.  A handful of standard bulbs hang in little star-shaped chicken wire cages: a whimsical indication that the distances to a few celestial bodies are less vast than the rest.

Said galaxy continues to shine with unabated intensity as houselights fade and Ollie the Martian (Oliver Cox) enters on a blue spacehopper and sporting a blue 70s track suit with a red polo-skivvy, a yellow scooter helmet, aviation goggles and oversized hiking boots.  He appears to half float, half stalk through space, eventually stopping before a shiny red ball with a loveheart drawn on it, which he declares to be Mars.

Introducing himself, our exotic visitor explains that he thinks he’s here for a reason, only he doesn’t know what it is.  From there he proceeds to enlighten us in the ways of his culture, and to share his experiences with Earth and its fascinating inhabitants. 

Cox’s comically eccentric performance is entirely as one might imagine an extraterrestrial creature trained in classical Earth oratory and dramatic techniques and subject to intensive direction.  Just about every syllable is projected with awestruck profundity, not to mention idiosyncrasy, from quirky nouns like “mouth-hole” and “floatsman”, to seemingly daft time-measurements: “3 months, 37 days, 97 hours and 67 seconds”. 

Given the presumed language and cultural barriers, the remarkable clarity and appeal of the alien’s resulting performance is testament to co-writer and director Barnie Duncan (who, also being Ollie’s uncle, is logically a Martian too).  What’s more, Duncan evidently had time and energy left over to compose the arrestingly intense sound design comprising throbbing electro-noises with funky home-grown psychedelic space-music.

Ollie’s otherworldly discourse continually shifts between his reminiscences of his own planet, where females are the stronger species and they don’t wage war, and his various encounters on ours.  Authentic science is frequently alluded to in the script, as with the comparative distance between Earth and Mars at different stages in their respective orbits, but is by no means the central purpose of the work. 

A more intriguing apparent side-effect of Ollie’s research is his discovery of levels of emotional depths he’d never dreamed possible, both negative and positive.  Meanwhile, scenes such as the preschool visit and the interview with Thomas the dog-owner play like broad sketches that perhaps take the humour to unnecessarily base and/or obvious levels, but it all more or less fits the established character.  It strikes me, as Ollie declares “I was often misunderstood,” that the sentence would be equally true without the “was”. 

Precisely what Ollie’s self-proclaimed unidentified purpose might be is not ultimately made clear by the fairly sudden conclusion.  Nevertheless he has successfully endeared himself to we privileged few Earthlings, and maybe even given us something to cogitate before continuing on his intrepid journey of discovery.

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