A Time Traveler's Guide to the Present

We saw a number of great one man shows at this year's Fringe so the bar had been set fairly high when as a family we saw A Time Traveler's Guide to the Present at theSpace on North Bridge. It's my second time in the room this week and for the second time this week the room is well under capacity which does not perhaps bode well.

The stage is fairly bare except for a few props which double up for a few items within the story, although the lack of even a small amount of stage furniture - which we had seen cleverly used in other shows - comes off as a little cheap.

Doug Harvey has written and stars in the show, the story of one normal man requested by a mysterious force from the future as the one that has to travel there on behalf of humanity for the STC to save us all from a world where humans abandoned each other for no reason.

The show is a little clunkier than it might be, jumping back and forth on a timeline as well as jumping between a multitude of characters for one man is always going to prove hard for any performer and Harvey just doesn't quite get it right. We're promised a fusion of science and sci-fi within the story, but everything doesn't come together as well as it might and as a result the story becomes difficult to follow, even for the astrophysicist and biggest of sci-fi fans amongst us. The ending to the story, revealing why the lead character was the one chosen to fly into the future is fairly predictable and I had seen coming before the pay-off.

Our hopes were high at the outset, sadly A Time Traveler's Guide to the Present did not hit the heights that we might have liked.