A new doc­u­men­tary about a DIY stage ver­sion of Alien is an absurd delight

Seem­ing­ly out of nowhere, a New Jer­sey high school’s pro­duc­tion of Rid­ley Scott’s Alien went viral in 2019, even attract­ing the atten­tion of Sigour­ney Weaver. The nov­el­ty of the sem­i­nal sci-fi hor­ror being (re)made with recy­cled parts cap­tured the public’s imag­i­na­tion – who would have thought that a DIY Alien stage play could work so well? As it turns out, an act­ing troupe most­ly made up of Dorset bus dri­vers had the same some years pri­or, and Alien on Stage looks at the group’s hilar­i­ous one-night performance.

After annu­al­ly putting on pan­tomimes, the group’s writer decid­ed to opt for some­thing less tra­di­tion­al – a comedic pro­duc­tion of his favourite movie, Alien. They had hoped that Alien’s pop­u­lar­i­ty would trans­late into tick­et sales, but only 20 peo­ple turned up to the first per­for­mance. Their for­tunes changed when two fans from an Alien on Stage fan club, Lucy Har­vey and Danielle Kum­mer – the mak­ers of this film – came down from Lon­don to help them crowd­fund a sec­ond attempt to stage the play, this time in the West End, some­thing that seemed like a pipe dream. It even­tu­al­ly opened to a sell-out crowd at the Leices­ter Square The­atre, the per­for­mance play­ing out in the documentary’s conclusion.

The direc­tors remain out of the pic­ture for the most part, choos­ing instead to focus on the pro­duc­tion rather than their inter­ac­tion with it; their film is as scrap­py and charm­ing as the pro­duc­tion itself. It feels like a fan project (it was also crowd­fund­ed) and a fun one at that, full of wink­ing ref­er­ences – such as the open­ing titles replac­ing the indus­tri­al space­ship Nos­tro­mo with an Eng­lish bus – which high­light the humil­i­ty of the pro­duc­tion team.

The lim­i­ta­tions of the film large­ly stem from its lack of con­text. While the cama­raderie between the direc­tors and the act­ing troupe is clear, there’s no sense of what drew Har­vey and Kum­mer to the pro­duc­tion in the first place. There’s also not much in the way of back­sto­ry, and it’s not clear how much the pro­duc­tion changed from its first iter­a­tion. Despite this, it’s hard not to root for such a charm­ing cast and crew, and the final pro­duc­tion is a hell of a lot of fun to wit­ness. A play­ful, lets-put-on-a-show doc­u­men­tary full of affec­tion for the peo­ple at its centre.