Solaris
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

AS NEWS breaks that astronomers have discovered the new watery planet K2-18b, this co-production by the  Lyceum and Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre bring us the story of scientists sent to investigate just such a planet and how it all goes wrong.

The ocean on Solaris is sentient and it toys with the spacemen by sending them replicants designed by their own repressed memories. The question is — are the scientists mad, or is this the way an alien might choose to make contact?

Writer David Grieg and director Matthew Lutton have created a compelling adaptation of  Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 sci-fi classic novel, later given cinematic life in versions by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbegh.

Ingeniously, we the audience become the unknowable alien ocean. We stare at our own reflection in in undulating, reptilian waves on the side of the space station and we can see straight through that wall to the humans trapped inside.

To amuse ourselves, we pop characters into the human zoo — children to scream in the corridors and dead lovers to taste their tears afresh. But they are all fakes and the game is for these individuals, slowly and painfully, to become aware of their own inauthenticity and to be driven to suicide.

But the catch is that suicide doesn’t work. This is Chekhov meets Alien, with added reincarnation.

The principal replicant, a talkative Aussie slacker, is an unstable in-betweener, who’s convincingly portrayed as a non-entity by Keegan Joyce. Grieg’s inventiveness is at its best in a scene where he undergoes a personality test but turns it around into an aggressive interrogation of the therapist’s own addiction to loneliness.

Solaris is potentially a psychological nightmare, a hall of mirrors in which no identity is secure. But, unlike Lem, Grieg attempts to provide us with a somewhat facile explanation — we are 70 per cent water, love comes in waves, tears are saline and thus we all yearn to be at one with the ocean.

This capitulation into surfer cliche might wash with an Australian audience but for me it breaks the spell of what is otherwise an outrageous, beautiful and innovative piece of theatre.

Runs until October 3, box office: lyceum.org.uk.