Akram Khan’s Creature opens with a historic voiceover – President Nixon addressing the astronauts who reached the moon in 1969. It’s a stirring moment, but almost immediately composer Vincenzo Lamagna distorts and shreds it – that era’s bright optimism has long rusted over. In Khan’s grimly imagined future, humanity has trashed this planet and space is just a fresh opportunity for exploitation.
Hope long ago left the building. In an arctic research station, fallen into disrepair, a military brigade prepares a new space mission, aiming to colonise the final frontier. Khan draws on Mary Shelley’s novels Frankenstein (vaunting experimentation, forlorn results) and The Last Man (pandemic dystopia), but the narrative most closely parallels Georg Büchner’s expressionist play Woyzeck. Instead of Büchner’s tormented soldier, Khan gives us the abused Creature, subjected to callous experiments to see if he can endure frozen conditions to indicate how humanity might fare in the hostile beyond.
