Simply sensational
As part of Offbeat Festival, I was lucky enough to catch I’ll Be Back, a new hour-long solo show at from Justine Malone, at the Old Fire Station a couple of weeks ago. Like the quote its title is referencing, the show is a loving homage to the Terminator films, specifically 1 and 2.
One-woman shows can really be anything stylistically, particular at a quirky, wide-ranging festival like Offbeat, so I didn’t know at all what to expect.
As we filed in to take our seats in the black box studio, the screen at the far side of the stage was projected with a dimly familiar sight: the pixellated red brick maze of the Windows 95 screensaver. It was then I had an inkling that we were in for something deeply creative and special.
I have a pet peeve for solo shows that don’t have a strong narrative cohesion. A stand-up set can wander a bit, stringing subjects up like Polaroids on the thinnest wire of relation to one another, but truly satisfying one-person plays need to take me on a narrative journey.
Luckily for me, this was something Malone, who has experience in both comedy and drag as well as acting, made integral to I’ll Be Back. The plot really is a condensed sci-fi action film, with a hero's journey, comedy, tragedy, time travel motorcycle chases, impressively rendered explosions, and (of course) a montage all squeezed into its runtime.
The moments it’s lampooning aren’t just plucked from thin air, roasted for quick laughs, than thrown away. They are built organically into a larger plot. A brief summary of which: the main character has survived Judgement Day, wherein most of the population of the planet was destroyed by sentient AI weapons programme Skynet. The show opens in 2042, as a droll corporate comedy, as our hero works at a museum of the old world, explaining the past cultural significance of Greggs and the like and answering to machines whose first language is html.
She is then offered a chance to become cybernetically enhanced, go back in time to her adolescence in the 1990s, and attempt to stop Skynet before it’s ever begun. We discover that her world ended in some ways long before the downfall of humanity, but rather with her older brother’s disappearance when she was twelve. But how are these things connected? That would be spoiling things.
Malone uses comic voiceovers and imagery to great effect to enhance her performance: Clippy, the chipper and supremely unhelpful virtual paper clip, is a side character, and there are countless hilarious and well chosen 90s references. The emotional immediacy to her character’s love and grief was the real gamble of the piece, and one that paid off. Malone has the acting chops to keep viewers gripped whether she’s making them cry or laugh.
It meant I wasn’t just intellectually appreciating the well-observed observational comedy, I was invested in the storyline and the show reminded me of what made the films so endearingly popular in the first place. Their visual and conceptual ridiculousness underpinned, rather than undermined their wonder, and contrasted with the humanity at the heart of the story in characters like Sarah and John Connor.
If I have one criticism, it would be that the timeline doesn’t entirely add up to me - if the character was a teenager in the 90s, she would be quite elderly by 2042, and is not played that way. But that’s a small complaint in the face of such an enormously enjoyable show, which I hope will, indeed, be back.