Can watching someone else’s psychedelic trip be interesting? This show proves that with the right cast, it can certainly have dazzling moments of fun. Add this to a tender and honest frame story, and you get an endearing and entertaining hour of theatre.Mark Junek plays the wonderful Dr Apple, a stereotypical buttoned-up science professor with a cute and predictable crush on his Teaching Assistant, and an uncomfortable relationship with a colleague whose work is far less orthodox - testing out a new psychedelic drug to prove that mind function is improved. There are some lovely touches to Apple’s character, such as the three pairs of wide-rimmed spectacles he keeps in various pockets of his blazer. It is in no small part down to Junek’s ability to make Dr Apple’s neuroses thoroughly charming, that we so happily ride along with him on his trip.The majority of the play occurs in the strange and silly world of Dr Apple’s drug-infused brain, very Alice in Wonderland in its episodic character. The cast do well to create this with a combination of simple ideas (like actors dancing in morph suits with pom-poms on their bums) and kooky comedy. The trip never fully leaves the Professor’s lecture theatre; when he awkwardly rests ‘under the shade’ of what he thinks is a tiny palm tree but is in fact an image on the overhead projector, we laugh because we can see both the real world and the warped reality of the drugs. Other moments like the rap-off are also wickedly funny.But the play could seriously do with cutting all the philosophising. We hear Apple implored to ‘let go and become the universe’ or something so many times and frankly it is boring and clichéd. By contrast, the lovely frame narrative could have more stage-time and development.All in all, the cast make a great job of creating watchable theatre from someone else’s trip, but you can’t help but wonder if the superior talents of the actors might be better used with a subject matter that has less potential to grate.
