an original, insightful and distinctly queer journey into the future
Shallowspace Cryotech Feverdream, the new Trans Sci-Fi body horror play from Elastic Fantastic is an original, insightful and distinctly queer journey into the future. More specifically, Shallowspace imagines a dystopian future in which a pre-apocalyptic humanity sends twelve individual “shepherds” into the void to float endlessly into eternity in an effort to save mankind from the dreaded third death – the final death visited only after any and all record of your existence has been lost. Written and performed by Callie O’Brien, Shallowspace is a 55-minute provocation on legacy, identity, and individualism. It is also something like a live CAPTCHA test, asking its audience to consider how we recognize and identify what is human.
Shallowspace made its London debut at Camden People’s Theatre as part of the SPRINT Festival. Despite the fantastical world of the piece, the set is surprisingly minimal. A white sheet hangs against the back wall, allowing O’Brien’s striking visuals to establish setting and tone. Shallowspace takes place aboard the starship Theseus, home to our protagonist August Shepherd, also played by O’Brien. In addition to frequent and dynamic projections, O’Brien uses just a black stool and two light rods to create the totality of the starship, from a lifelike cryo-pod to the nebulous recesses of August’s memories. Ambiance is brilliantly-achieved, likely thanks to director Mike Dorey. The set lets us know we are in a sterile, scientific environment but the striking colors and visuals add intensity and vibrance to the space, evoking emotions from melancholia to fear.
We meet August at a time in the ambiguous future at which point society on earth has collapsed save for its twelve orbiting “contingency plans.” August introduces herself as one of said “contingency plans,” fated to float interminably through time and space, guarding herself and her starship as the sole remaining record of human existence. This existence is housed in The Archive, a single database containing the entirety of human history – mankind’s final, desperate plea to be remembered beyond the grave. Shallowspace opens as August gains consciousness, we can assume, for the hundredth to thousandth time. Her first order of business is to complete her cognition status check, which includes listing five similarities between an orange and an apple.
Categorization – of ideas, things, people – is an important throughline in Shallowspace. In order to demonstrate accurate cognitive processing and functioning, August must prove her ability to quickly sort items, identify similarities and differences, and organize ideas based on labels. The need to prove sentience by demonstrating the ability to easily categorize the other based on arbitrary definitions is a heightened reflection of our very real social norms. August’s ability to do so breaks down over the course of the play as she comes to understand more elements of her consciousness and starts to question and challenge what she knows of her own existence. In her search for truth and meaning, August discovers the only thing she can be truly sure of is what she knows because she feels it. August’s body is hers alone and knows different than her mind, which hosts the ideas of others. Shallowspace asks us, too, how we know what we know and challenges the idea that all things must be identified and organized in association with each other. It invites us to trust that which we know deep inside over that which we are told or shown about ourselves.
As August slowly comes to terms with the nature of her existence and purpose, she comes to understand her physical body as something being used to further a goal outside of herself. She does so in conversation with the disembodied voice of the artificial intelligence controlling the ship, voiced by Ally Haughey. The significance of a physical body is underscored at a pivotal moment when the technology goes wrong and August’s physical body is implicated. The experience of physical pain stands in stark contrast to the gentle intimacy that she associates with the human form. Until this point, she has mourned the voice’s lack of accompanying body as a loss of the singular and human experience of physical touch.
While there is no shortage of art being made at this very moment about artificial intelligence as a springboard for questioning “what is human,” Shallowspace manages to avoid the laziest and most gratuitous tropes. There is an interesting moment when August inverts a previously accepted logic. When the disembodied voice first prompts her to list five similarities between an apple and a fruit, August gives the answers we expect: they are both fruits, they are both sweet. By the end of Shallowspace, August is sure that oranges and apples share almost no similarities at all. After all, no two apples are anything alike.
This is a play about human nature and destruction, meaning there is an unfortunate synchronicity between themes and events on and off stage. Questions about the nature and future of our species are increasingly relevant with each passing news cycle. During one of her more on-the-nose musings, August wonders how anyone who viewed The Archive could want anything to do with humanity after “seeing what we did to each other.”Luckily, the play is so engrossing that the world outside eventually starts to disappear.
In addition to her excellent script, O’Brien delivers an incredible solo performance. Commanding attention and maintaining audience interest alone onstage is no small feat, and O’Brien manages to capture August’s humor, pathos and pain in equal measure. The script is, at times, repetitive, though some amount of monotony is necessary for maximum impact. August also remains unfortunately opaque. Although she is a clear stand-in for her species, we are given enough unique moments and insights into her prior life to want more.
Shallowspace examines humanity at a distance – the way you might view earth from outer space. O’Brien peels back the layers of personhood to expose what truly makes something human and what it means to classify the infinitely unique versions of personhood into one collective “humanity.” The phrase WE ARE HUMANITY is repeatedly projected onstage and the play is about nothing less. Shallowspace is a thoroughly engaging directive to liberate us from the oppressive systems and structures that control and define what it is to be human.
Shallowspace was a one-night-only engagement at Camden People’s Theatre. Information on its upcoming 2026 Europe Tour can be found at www.elasticfantastic.co.uk/shallowspace/.