Last year
The Kindness of Strangers garnered less praise from me than it did from most people - although that's not because I disliked it as such, but because it gave me motion sickness. With Shoreditch Town Hall seeming more likely to stay still for 80 minutes than the back of an ambulance, I decided to give Curious Directive another go, with a (hopefully less queasy) trip to their 2014 Fringe First winner,
Pioneer. It's 2029*, eight years after an initial mission to send astronauts to Mars ended in disaster, and now a new crew is being sent up amid much publicity. What the public doesn't know is that in the intervening years a top-secret mission has sent a Dutch couple to the planet, and their successful survival has made NASA confident enough to go public with the latest attempt. As they await the new arrivals though, one of the astronauts disappears while carrying out routine repairs. Left alone with just her fears and the ship's computer, his partner Imke (Flora Denman) starts to crack.
