The Time Machine
The Carriageworks, Leeds/Touring
4 Stars

IT’S wonderful what can be achieved with a lump of wood and some imagination.

Stumbling out of a metronome-shaped contraption in soiled long johns and threadbare socks, Robert Lloyd Parry as a time travelling Victorian scientist recounts his adventures from the year 802,701 AD from the safety of a moonlit garden in Richmond-upon-Thames.

With just the time machine, a birdbath and metal chair for props, this one-man show relies on Lloyd Parry’s physicality to bring to life the time he spent with the Eloi, “exquisite, fragile things of the future” who live in the Upperworld and the “human spider” Morlocks occupying the Underworld.

Taking some sections of HG Wells’s novella almost verbatim, Parry has adapted it with the addition of humorous flourishes to make the tale his own.

And he’s made subtle changes to update the sci-fi romance’s social and environmental warnings about the future, re-emphasising the divisions in today’s society and suggesting the Eloi are living in a Garden of Eden at the end of humanity.

Performed with an air of dishevelled disbelief, the actor has also given the traveller a greater sense of ego.

At one point he wonders if the Eloi regard him as a god and later imagines himself being painted in a landscape that shows humanity on the wane.

Drawing on some of the spooky atmospherics, the red backlighting when the time traveller visits the dying Earth is powerfully evocative, while the constantly chiming clock at the start of the monologue forcefully signifies time running away with itself.

Wells’s novella, which coined the term time machine, may be over a hundred years old but with this atmospheric and entertaining adaptation Parry proves that it’s still a deeply engaging idea with much to say about today’s society.

Tours until July 31, details: www.nunkie.co.uk.