Cameron Sinclair Harris’ PLANETS!!! lifts off at Soho Rising 2025
The planets have been a concern of scientists, astrologists, and artists for millennia. Few, however, have asked the important questions. Who’s the neurotic one? Who’s the quiet, sexy one? Who’s the Samantha? The Carrie? In the latter case it’s probably Mars. It’s a silly premise, but Cameron Sinclair Harris allows us to meet these giants of the solar system in their solo show PLANETS!!!. It’s part of the Soho Theatre’s 2025 edition of Soho Rising, a fortnight of shows from up-and-coming talent in writing, comedy, cabaret, and drag. It’s no simple task in a venue who’s guest book includes greats like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Lucy McCormick, and Peaches Christ.
As our ringleader and interstellar tour guide, Sinclair Harris has a charmingly intense presence. There’s an unpredictability behind their cheeky smile and wide eyes, daring us to come aboard their spacecraft. We gladly participate but are never beyond scolding if we mess up — like kids in a playground being directed by a particularly bossy theatre kid or eccentric drama teacher. It’s that return to childhood play and imagination that anchors Sinclair Harris’ show: cardboard boxes become a rocket ship, a stuffed dog fills in for Laika, we sing twinkle twinkle little star like a classroom of well behaved toddlers.
Thankfully, Sinclair Harris never veers too far into nostalgia and sentimentality in their dialogue. Still there is some profundity: time is an ever present theme. ‘We don’t have much time left’, Sinclair Harris reminds us throughout the night. This is not just regarding our allotted hour-long slot in the theatre, but that fateful day thousands of years from now when the sun will finally devour our solar system (it turns out planets also have their own mortal anxieties). Earth is eager to remind us that the clock is ticking even louder for the polluting earthlings — and spoiler alert, Mars doesn’t want us moving in anytime soon.
Sinclair Harris’ planetary caricatures are loud and proud, and only sometimes uncomfortably so, as is the case with the Bradshaw-esque Mars. The most intense planet you’ve met in a club bathroom after a bump. However, nobody overstays their welcome. Uranus waxes philosophically over the starry lullaby with its accordion — ‘why doesn’t the twinkle twinkle little star ever wonder about us?”. Mercury’s opening musical number is straight out of an existentialist children’s show. Saturn has just released a bratty single, and wouldn’t you too with rings like that? The highlight is a toxic, desolate, barren planet out to clear her name, a deliciously out of touch Venus — like a yummy mummy with a gravitational pull.
What makes PLANETS!!! work is not just the commitment to the ridiculousness of the premise, but the humanity embedded within these figures. We all know who these planets are, we’ve ran into a Uranus at university or a Venus in the line at Gail’s, Sinclair Harris’ balance between the observational and the whacky, the profound and the resonatory, is deftly maintained, never tipping into hamfisted excess. Cameron Sinclair Harris is a rocket getting ready for take-off.