This month marks the 25th anniversary of the world premiere of Alan Ayckbourn’s sci-fi family play Callisto#7.

The play, which premiered in 1999 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, celebrates Alan’s love of science fiction in print, on screen and even in gaming with nods to other seminal sci-fi works which he has enjoyed since his youth.

Callisto#7 is, in today’s parlance, a reboot almost of an earlier play, Callisto 5. Alan wrote this play in 1990 but when his company moved to its new home, the Stephen Joseph Theatre, in 1996, he began looking at and revising certain plays he was unhappy with and felt could be improved. The most famous was his rewrite of the flop musical Jeeves as By Jeeves, but later, Callisto 5 came under scrutiny.

The earliest reference to Callisto 5 and its inspiration was actually published after the play had premiered in Bernard F Dukore’s book Alan Ayckbourn: A Casebook. This was published in 1991 but featured an interview from 27 June 1990 in which Alan talked about what was – at that point – his next play, Callisto 5.

“I had the idea that I’d write a sort of Aliens, slightly mixed with a children’s Henceforward… whereby we saw our young hero left alone on [the Galilean moon] Callisto 5. His parents went out and left him when he was aged eight… and he’s been left with a mechanical babysitter by his parents to look after him while his parents weren’t around. She’s still programmed to babysit eight years later. He’s grown. It is the Nan 500 from Henceforward…. She’s done mad things to insist he goes to bed….”

Alan’s family plays have frequently been related to his ‘adult’ work – Invisible Friends is famously a young person’s version of Woman in Mind – and the Callisto plays are regarded by the author as counterpoints to Henceforward….

The reference to Aliens is, of course, James Cameron’s 1986 sci-fi action flick for which Sigourney Weaver was Oscar nominated for reprising the role of Ripley from Alien. The latter was directed by Ridley Scott, whose world-building has always been influential on Alan. The broken, dystopian worlds of Alien and Blade Runner being very influential in his sci-fi writing.

Alan goes on to explain his ambitions for the play – remember this is 1990 and the idea of incorporating and integrating live action and pre-recorded video into a play, particularly for a theatre whose budget would have been severely limited, would have been very ambitious and technically demanding.

“The monster in this play I’m rather pleased with. I’m going to use a lot of video in it – again like Henceforward… – but much more so because I’ve decided a good idea would be to have the monster visible only on video. It’s only picked up by video recorders. He looks directly at the space where it is: there’s nothing there. It never actually appears on stage, but the kid, realising it’s in the room with him, has the bright idea of plugging the video into a unit and scouting the room. So what the kids watching the show will get is a boy in an empty room apparently moving probably a dummy video camera around, which will be firing actually into a videotape. Now and then you’ll catch a glimpse of the monster on the video screens, which will be all around the room.”

Alan wrote the play during summer 1990 knowing that its technical elements would require extra planning. Indeed Alan’s storyboards still survive in archive for the pre-recorded sections of the film which feature both world-building footage as well as the previously mentioned ‘live’ elements as the alien is hunted down.

The play follows Jem, a teenage boy, who is alone on the space station Callisto#5 after his parents left years earlier and have not been heard off since. His sister, Jodi, is in cryogenic sleep and his only company are a nanny robot DAMARIS and the station computer IRIS. Into this an invisible alien apparently infiltrates the station which Jem has to defeat. The nods to the movie Alien with an unstable android, all-seeing computer and a rampaging alien – with a hint of Predator thrown in – are unmistakeable.

Interestingly – and what is made explicit in the Dukore interview – is the link between Callisto#5 and Henceforward… was going to be explicit as the android was initially intended to be a NAN500 model, as featured in the earlier play. During writing, Alan changed his mind and created a more overtly robotic character- in look and speech – with DAMARIS rather than the more humanised NAN.

Whilst Callisto was inspired by Hollywood blockbusters, the budget was not. The barely seen monster, created for the video scenes, was played by the theatre’s press office, Jeannie Swales, and in the grand tradition of ’60s to ’80s British science fiction television such as Doctor Who, made creative use of bubble wrap and a bin for a head with the base cut off to be replaced by vicious cardboard fangs…

Given the barely seen glimpses of the monster, Alan let the imagination of his young audience do the majority of the heavy lifting with regard to what the threat was.

Although the link between the Callisto plays and Henceforward… is not as overt as that between Invisible Friends and Woman In Mind, they both feature themes of isolation, the importance of human contact / relationships and the dehumanising effects of technology in a near future world (albeit a city in the north of England in Henceforward… and one of Jupiter’s moons in Callisto 5 / Callisto#7).

What the Callisto plays also share in common with Invisible Friends – and all Alan’s ‘family’ plays – is the optimistic ending that both Woman In Mind and Henceforward… lack; Alan being particularly adamant that plays for young people can be dark but ultimately should be optimistic. All this illustrates the oft-quoted fact that all of Alan Ayckbourn’s plays – no matter who they are aimed at – are dealing with similar themes and issues, but the family plays just move at a faster pace and tend to be more optimistic.

The play did succeed in utilising the video footage as Alan had intended with screens hung from the lighting grid above the in-the-round acting space facing the audience. The footage was obviously pre-recorded to show an otherwise invisible monster wandering the on-stage set. As a result of this, the actor holding the dummy video camera had to exactly mirror the movement of the camera footage being shown on the screens, as it is supposed to be a live-feed from the camera to the monitors.

Arguably, the Callisto plays – especially Callisto#7 – are also inspired by video games: made explicit by opening on an actual video game being played and climaxing with the revelation that all that has occurred has – essentially – been a game. The level-like structure of the play with a new challenge to be solved before the children can move on, culminating in a confrontation with an intimidating enemy echoes classic gaming structures and would be familiar to a young audience.

Alan himself had long been a fan of gaming from playing the early games in Scarborough’s seafront arcades to home-computer gaming and this interest, like that of his movie influences, is ever present in the Callisto plays.

Callisto 5 opened at the Stephen Joseph Theatre In The Round in December 1990 and was a success with its young audiences and received predominantly positive reviews. There’s no initial evidence to suggest Alan was unhappy with the play and it was published, but – in subsequent years – he mentioned he intended to revise it.

This he did in 1999 with Callisto#7. He kept the basic structure and plot of the play but added a second character, Jem’s older sister Jodi – now the teenager – to create a more dramatic relationship.

“It’s got another character in it. It’s written with a little boy in it now – and a little girl. The girl is older. It made it slightly more human. She is now left to look after her little kid brother and he is the one who’s going moody and she’s doing her best – she’s only thirteen – she’s trying to keep control while the mother and father are away. But the kid is really giving her a bad time saying, ‘I don’t wanna talk to you. I just want my mother and father.’ And she’s saying, ‘So do I.’ And so the computer creates a monster, like it did before, in order to unite them because it sees they’re on the verge of having a breakdown. So they create the old solution of having a common enemy. The little boy finds he’s helping his sister to fight it and they both learn to have respect for each other. I think it’s a better slant on it.”

Although the essential structure of the play stayed the same, much of the play was altered to facilitate the dynamics between the older sister, thrust into the role of adult and frustrated by machines that will not answer her questions as they do not recognise she is no longer a child, and the younger brother who misses his parents and who directs his anger at his sister. The role of the android – now named PADWAC – is altered whilst IRIS becomes a little more threatening and ambiguous in its behaviour, further bringing up the image of Mother (or more accurately MU/TH/UR) in Alien.

With the developments in technology and the enhanced production facilities of the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Callisto#7 was – almost – the big budget remake / reboot of Callisto 5 with the action and thrills ramped up for an exciting theatrical adventure, which amply demonstrated the potential of theatre and the power of in-the-round staging to a young audience who might not necessarily have visited a theatre before.

Callisto#7 premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre on 4 December 1999 and was well received and a success. Intriguingly, despite being Alan’s preferred version of the play and being available to produce, it has never been published.

It is a play which the playwright has professed fondness for and is perhaps his one play for young people which best reflects his own interests as a young person, reading the Golden Age of sci-fi novels and watching sci-fi films – which is made explicit in his original programme note.

“This play is dedicated to Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Brian Aldiss, Stanley Kubrick, whoever it was that made Forbidden Planet, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, every Astronaut who ever flew, Ridley Scott and the team who made Alien, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Patrick Moore, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Pohl and Kornbluth, Paul Anderson, Heather Cooper, Bernard Lovell, Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise, John Carpenter, Philip K. Dick, A. E. Van Vogt, Stephen Hawking, John Wyndham, all the Voyager Spacecraft and everyone who has ever excited and intrigued our minds with their thoughts and conjectures about Other Worlds and Other Life Forms (real or unreal). Callisto 5 is my own small contribution to the sum of their wonderings and imaginings…”

Twenty-five years on and Callisto#7 is still a future-set play that hasn’t been completely overtaken by real-life technology and events. But, more importantly, it still stands as a celebration of the imagination and all those things which we enjoy and influence us in our youth and, in the case of Callisto#7, can then be reinvented and hopefully inspire another generation.

Simon Murgatroyd (2024)

Copyright of Simon Murgatroyd. Please do not reproduce without permission of the copyright holder.