Written and performed by Imitating The Dog, supported by Lancaster Arts and Cast, Doncaster.
(Play review, Liverpool Playhouse, 04/03/26)
Introduction
I knew I wasn’t going to like this play within the first minute of the start. The following nine-and-a-half hours (or so it seemed) did little to change my mind.
To begin, I’ll give a brief overview of the creator of the original source material.
H.G. Wells was an English Fabian socialist whose first five novels, or, more accurately, novellas, written in the closing years of the Victorian era, virtually invented modern Science Fiction, or Speculative Fiction as it was known at the time. These five short books, each of which I’ve read at least twice, dealt with space travel, about a decade before the Wright brothers first man-made flight (The First Men On The Moon), the dangers of scientific hubris (The Invisible Man and the Island of Doctor Moreau), time-travel (The Time Machine. Many argue that even the concept of travelling through time didn’t exist before this book), and, of course Alien invasion in War of the Worlds.
It should be noted that Wells himself was a strong supporter of the liberating potential of scientific progress. His elitist, statist idea of socialism saw the men of science and reason as something akin to the Philosopher Kings of Plato’s Republic. Later, he would meet with Stalin, and entertained the idea that he and the Soviet Communist Party were accomplishing the realisation of his ideas in practice.
Fo a time, he also had high hopes for Mussolini’s Fascista and Hitlers NSDAP. He soon pedalled back from this, as he did, to a lesser extent on the USSR. However, in common among much of the British Left in his era, he was a great believer in eugenics (the subject of The Island of Doctor Moreau), until the Nazis went and ruined by taking the idea to an extreme.
He was also very much a man of his time in believing in the civilising mission of British Imperialism.
The biography of Wells by former Labour Party leader Michael Foot, who was friends with H.G. from the 1930s up until Wells’ death in 1945 is well worth a read, though it does somewhat gloss over those aspects of Wells’ thought that didn’t quite fit with those of the Left in the 1980s and 1990s.
In contrast, whomever wrote this play, and it’s credited to a collective rather than an individual, appear to be very much the modern, ultra-liberal left types. I could almost smell the Refugees Welcome banner lurking unseen behind every scene and every word.
It no doubt seemed a good idea at the time, ‘Mm, War of the Worlds, alien invasion, attitudes to mass immigration. Surely there’s room for adapting it as a modern allegory on the dangers posed by the rise of the Far Right?’
It probably could be done, and done well. But it seemed to me that the concept began with the idea, with little thought as to how it might work in practice.
So, to that opening. We begin with a man in pyjamas, henceforth known as MIP, as it is, it seems not to have occurred to the creator(s) that giving characters names helps to build audience engagement, awakening on a bare stage, with enough props to signify a hospital. He is clearly confused and disorientated. The large screen behind him, and to each side of the stage, inform us that we are in Britain 1968. Black and white Footage and photographs of a Trafalgar Square ‘Far Right’ rally appear while the vice of Enoch Powell intones excerpts from his famous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (Like the Roman, I see the Tiber foaming with much blood…In thirty-years-time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’ etc), something that will continue periodically throughout the play.
Two problems here. 1) I knew immediately we were in for far too much bleeding-heart liberalism for my taste, and 2) The rally seems to be from an earlier period, perhaps the one that took place on the day I was born, July 1st 1962, addressed by would be British Fuhrer Colin Jordan, though, the Mosely Speaks banner that can clearly be seen, suggest one of post-war Mosely’s dismal election campaigns, maybe from his parliamentary bid for a seat in Notting Hill (which sparked race riots) in 1959, or one of his last attempts to get back into parliament, 1964 or 1966.
For all his faults, of which being an early adopter of what would later become Thatcherite economics is, in my view, the worst, Powell was an erudite intellectual, a High Tory, not given to rabble rousing speeches at mass rallies. In this respect, the play was symptomatic of the Left’s inability to distinguish between different strands of Right-Wing opinion, so that staunch Zionist globalist Farage is routinely referred to as a ‘Nazi’. Mosely, Powell, Farage, Rupert Lowe, all the same, right?
Not really, no.
Returning to the time the play is set, we see among MIP’s belongings as he prepares to leave the hospital, a National Front badge. The NF had only been formed in 1967, from a collection of disparate Nationalist/Patriotic groups. It was hardly a thing in 1968, and Powell had no connection with it, though there’s no doubt that his interventions on the subject of immigration helped it to grow.
As the story, such as it is, evolves, MIP flees the hospital after discovering all around him within it are dead, and goes on the run. We learn that his injuries were sustained after being kicked by a horse at the Trafalgar Square rally. He dislikes immigration, and therefore is an Unsympathetic Character.
He meets up with his wife (who, I seem to remember, was given a name, Eve). He learns, and we learn via the screens, that Britain, at least, has indeed been invaded by alien war machines containing slivery snake-like aliens.
MIP and Eve head for France hoping that thins might be better there.
They hope to get there via a small boat.
What else?
Eve does not share her husband’s views on immigration and foreigners, a point hammered home by some exposition heavy dialogue between the two.
MIP has become a refugee fleeing for his life.
Oh, the tragic irony.
They meet some black people along the way.
Rather bizarrely, they too are Unsympathetic Characters.
I won’t spoil the play for anyone by giving away the end. But it doesn’t end well.
And involves water.
Positives
I don’t like criticising fellow creatives, so I do try to highlight positives, where possible.
There were some.
The actors themselves did the best they could. Thy earned their money and the polite round of applause from the well-attended but not full Playhouse for this opening performance was well-deserved.
The two black actors, one male, one female, played two or three different roles each, though MIP was always MIP. I have little criticism of them, except to say that black man character (1) kept giggling inanely. Presumably, the invasion and the devastation they had caused to our once Green and Pleasant Land had driven him insane.
MIP was played competently, and I thought Eve stole the show, though whether she stole anything of value is another matter. She’ll do better. They all will.
Bless.
The interplay between the actors and the screens was actually quite creatively done. So, for instance, MIP would run on the spot on the stage, and this would appear on the screen as though he was running through the desolate streets. Or, he would stand rotating a detached steering wheel in his hand, and this would seem as if he was driving a car through a deserted road.
If you suspended your disbelief and concentrated on the action on the screen rather than the actors on the stage, it looked good sometimes though, from seat in the front row, constantly looking up at the main screen gave me neck pain.
The actors were filmed live by the other actors (and there were only four of them in total) not needed in that scene. So, credit to them, and for the Director in making good use of obviously limited resources.
Other people were manipulating the imagery on screen from period looking consoles at the side of the stage. It was well done, from a technical point of view, but I did find myself examining and trying to work out the mechanics of the production almost as much as I did the play itself.
The Alien War Machines, though we didn’t see much of them, on the screen, naturally, looked as they should, that is like they did in the excellent 1953 film production (which is better than the one with Tom Cruise, though that’s OK too).
It was suggested that the aliens came from Andromeda rather than from Mars as in the original story. I suppose because it was considered to be a settled matter that Mars couldn’t support life by 1968. I don’t think this mattered much.
Negatives
It’s difficult to pinpoint isolated instances of what was wrong with this play, because it’s the whole concept that was, in my opinion, misguided.
I’m quite capable of watching something, a play, a film, whatever, that advances a message I fundamentally disagree with disagree with, and still enjoy it. I can also watch something that is full of glaring faults, but still conclude that it was worth making, and that I am glad I saw it. See my recent review of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”. Anybody with any familiarity with source material, or even only of previous adaptations would conclude that it was full of misguided ideas and that it missed or misunderstood many of the central themes of the novel. But I still admired its ambition, and its visual and sonic beauty. I could see what Fennell was trying to do, and enough elements remained for it to be worthy of the title.
But with this adaptation of another great book, I left the theatre with literally no idea of what message the writer(s) were trying to convey, what message it was trying to convey, whether I agreed with it or not.
What were we supposed to make of the constant use of excerpts from Powell’s most famous speech, the most obvious excerpts?
What had this to do with the actual and clearly hostile extra-terrestrial invasion that was an on-screen backdrop to the ‘action’ on stage?
Since Powell’s time, immigration into Britain and the resulting demographic change has accelerated exponentiall, especially during the last thirty years; at a pace that Powell himself would have thought fanciful.
So, one conclusion might be that the central character’s fears about ‘coloured’ immigration has been proven to be correct, that, to coin a phrase used in the play and which was current at the time it was set, when dockers and London meat porters marched in his support, ‘Enoch was right.’
But clearly this wasn’t what the creators were hoping for.
The only clue, as far as far as I could tell as to what we were meant to take from the play comes near the end, when liberal wife says to MIP, “Did you never stop to think that your attitudes might have consequences?”
So, his ‘racism’ somehow brought about the coming of the Andromedin invasion? That this was justified retribution?
How, exactly?
Or is it that, yes, there are problems associated with immigration, but only because we weren’t more welcoming.
OK, I’m not sure that works in the case of East Pakistani rape-gangs, but it’s an argument that many share.
She also said, ‘There never was an us, pure and separate.’
Of course, that is factually true. My own DNA is a mix of English, Irish, Scandinavian, and other European. And I have added to the mix by marrying ‘out’ and adding South East Asian to my bloodline via our two sons. But there has long been an English people and a British nation, and at the end of World War Two it was 98% white. I don’t know the figure for 1968 but, growing up in the 1970s, I still remember a time when it was a rarity to see a ‘person of colour’.
It is not racist to remember and to notice.
In any case, what has this to do with War of the Worlds, written, we should remember, by a supporter of Empire who would likely have been horrified by mass immigration? If they should arrive from the skies, should we wave ‘refugees welcome’ banners at fearsome tripod war machines as they vaporise our cities and our people?
If an Alien Invasion was to happen for real, then perhaps we really would unite, all races, our unity as human beings overriding our tribal separation. There’s a point to be made there, but the play fails to make it.
In any case, liberal wife would still be wrong. There would still be an ‘Us and Them.’
Conclusion
A bold and brave re-imagining of a timeless and ground breaking classic of English literature? A thoughtful work that forced one to reevaluate one’s attitude to the challenging issue of immigration and forced migration, especially at a time of a new and devastating war of imperialist aggression in West Asia?
No, and no.
It was reasonably executed, but if the aim was analogical, then it needed a lot more thought.
It just didn’t work.
The play has finished its run at the Playhouse now, but it might be coming to a theatre near you soon. See it, if you like. Maybe I’m missing something.
Anthony C Green, March, 2026
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