Life Out There

Tim Foley

Ransack Theatre

Lowry, Salford

July 1-4, 2026: 2 hrs 15 mins

(also at The Engine Room, Wigan, July 6-9, and Jodrell Bank Observatory, July 16)

Lost in space: The cast of Life Out There. All pics: Tom Doona

Tim Foley’s new play Life Out There turned out to be substantially longer than the timing announced, with a pre-interval duration of 75 minutes – which may point to a need for some reworking, in the light of experience, after this outing.

It’s got several things in common with his sci-fi drama Electric Rosary, memorably seen at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre in 2022 (about a super-AI robot joining a convent and becoming a better nun than the humans), and indeed something in common with his two-hander Driftwood, which visited the Lowry on a more extensive UK tour last year.

There’s a sense that we’re seeing confined events in an enclosed world, while an out-of-control larger reality is disintegrating. In this case we’re on a spaceship looking for a second Earth for humanity to escape to, since ours is on fire and flooding. They need to find a “blue dot”, not another “grey blob”.

There’s a crew of four: Baby (Brianna Douglas), the engineer; River (Samuel Gosrani), the “newbie” member; Witney (Sophie Steer), the level-headed, logical one (who, interestingly, is also the voice of faith in God); and Clarke (Alastair Michael), who’s in temporary charge. Temporary, because their commander Isaacs (whose voice – Jack Myers – we hear, but whom we never see) has gone on a solo mission in their only shuttle to investigate a new planet, and it looks like he's never coming back. What’s more, their power source is being depleted and they may not make it back to Earth.

It’s a lost-in-space scenario with all the implications of well-worn sci-fi memes: if there is another habitable world up there, a Paradise, would our intervention (“breach”, they call it) destroy its perfection – something CS Lewis explored in Perelandra – and if there are intelligent living things out there, would they try to communicate with any explorers we sent? Are there voices of the dead in a place beyond the stars? What do you do when the one in charge is a victim of strong emotions and loses rationality?

Foley gives each of his astronauts a back-story that keeps coming to the front – quite confusingly sometimes – and as the single set does duty for the interior of their ship, its docking airlock, the interior of the shuttle (eventually), and the exterior (as spacewalks come into it too), you need imagination to transfer your mind to each supposed location, despite the best efforts of director Piers Black, set and costume designer Milla Clarke, lighting designer Alex Fernandes, video designer SR, and sound designer Patch Middleton. I guess that’s space sci-fi for you, as done on a small stage.

I didn’t get why there had to be projection of a version of the text on the lower front of the acting area (only partly visible and not entirely the same as the words the actors have arrived at), and in the end it isn't totally clear what the outcome of the story is. Foley’s gift for natural, spoken dialogue is undiminished, and he has some wonderful turns of phrase, but the blizzard of references and back-story detail make it quite hard to keep up.

The foursome themselves are great. They’re asked to do a lot physically, including simulating weightless floating, getting drunk and going berserk (the movement director is Chi-San Howard), and their creation of personality and complicated emotion is first-class – especially Sophie Steer.

More info and tickets here