What Would Spock Do?

Leonard Nimoy died in February, giving Jon Brittain six months to throw together a Fringe show about Spock and Star Trek fandom. This monologue, performed by Sam Donnelly, is the banal result. 

We’ve seen it all before: boy (Gary) meets girl (Kiera). She’s not embarrassed about being a fan, but he is. So he doesn’t tell his work mates that they’re going out. It’s the story of a guy who lies to his girlfriend from day one. 

And in case there was any doubt that it's about Star Trek, in case it was too hard to tell from the title, the Star Trek posters and memorabilia on stage, the life-sized cutout of Leonard Nimoy, the novelty Star Trek related music that plays as the audience enters, in case all of that wasn’t enough, Gary says “I’m a fan of Star Trek” at least 70 times during the course of the hour. 

Yet he still feels the need to explain things like conventions and Trekkies as if its audience weren’t going to be entirely composed of people with at least some remote interest in Star Trek. And its lack of subtlety persists: “I’m Gary by the way”, is Gary’s introduction.

Fandom of any allegiance—be it the Cumberbitches or the Beliebers—is a fascinating phenomenon, but here it becomes part of an uninteresting story and is probed only in a very light way. There’s a niggling feeling that this might be everything "nerds" and "geeks" should hate: self-proclamation, being the sanitised and acceptable face of fandom. It’s a play that badly goes where many have gone before.