ajhlovestheatre

SUPERSONIC MAN 

written and directed by Chris Burgess

Southwark Playhouse – Borough, London – until 3 May 2025

running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes including interval 

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/supersonic-man/

This is a real original: a brand new British pop musical about a subject that one wouldn’t normally expect to sing and dance. If Supersonic Man hits the stage, in creator Chris Burgess’s own production, looking more like a work-in-progress than a fully developed piece, it is still refreshing to come across a new tuner with intelligence and, like its principal character and the real life human who inspired him, a genuine sense of thinking outside the box.

It’s very loosely based on the astonishing story of Peter Scott-Morgan whose motor neurone disease diagnosis prompted him, via a series of operations and cutting edge technology, to reinvent himself as a ‘human cyborg’ able, for a time, to communicate, exert control and have some physical autonomy over his rapidly failing body. Scott-Morgan was also one half of the first legally recognised gay marriage in England, and was the subject of a 2020 Channel 4 documentary and a self-penned memoir, Peter 2.0.

That first aspect of Scott-Morgan’s tale is so remarkable that it could only be true but, interestingly, Burgess doesn’t go down the biography route, instead using it as the jumping-off point for a contemporary musical strong on human interest, drama and some surprising zany humour. This is one of several unexpected artistic choices that, even if they don’t all land, bespeak of a creative talent with a bold imagination and a rock solid literacy in musical theatre conventions.

Burgess’s hero Adam (played with attack and a commendable lack of sentimentality by Dylan Aiello) is very much a gay Alpha Male: witty, bolshy, sexually voracious and living life to the full when he receives his devastating diagnosis. A fast-moving opening section establishes the hectic social whirl he enjoys in Brighton with his partner Darryl (a dashing Dominic Sullivan). It’s poignant watching this in the same week that the theatre world lost William Finn as there seems a direct through-line from Finn’s AIDS-era masterpiece Falsettos which depicted functioning gay lives and community decimated by the unexpected intrusion of terminal illness, except that in the case of Supersonic Man it’s the challenges of progressive neurological disorders that characterise MND.

Adam is a fighter though and Burgess as writer and Aiello as actor have the courage to make him less than sympathetic a lot of the time as he barks, rails and sasses against the unfair hand that life has dealt him. There is real bite and the tang of emotional authenticity in the scenes where Adam vents his frustrations at Sullivan’s likeable Darryl. 

The absence of schmaltz is admirable but, in its present form, the show’s gear changes between hard-hitting, superbly written domestic tragedy, off-the-wall humour (Adam’s friends treat his condition with a flippancy that sometimes borders on insensitivity) and flights of fantasy (there’s a number with Adam in full metallic robot mode that needs to be seen to be believed) are too abrupt. I feel as though the production and writing either need to coalesce more into a uniform style or make the differences between Adam, Darryl and their friends’s private anguish and the cartoon-like grotesquerie of other figures they encounter (a monstrous TV producer is hilarious on first appearance but becomes tiresome, the “boffins” responsible for the scientific side of Adam’s treatment are like first cousins to Despicable Me’s Minions) way more pronounced. 

Still, the show is often genuinely funny and when it aims for seriousness it’s seldom mawkish and is disarmingly matter-of-fact, prompted probably by Adam’s determination to never, bar a few understandable wobbles, feel sorry for himself. The rather rudimentary sound design makes it hard to decipher a lot of the lyrics, but the book scenes fare better. The references to the late Stephen Hawking, a public figure with a life trajectory that Adam would like to see for himself, feel a little shoe-horned in at present but they are undoubtedly pertinent to the story being told.

Burgess is a gifted, eclectic tunesmith, and many of the numbers really hit home, but there are just too many styles and allusions to showbiz musical conventions for the score to fully resonate. It’s certainly fixable, it just feels as though it needs some judicious streamlining, and possibly cutting a couple of extraneous songs. Musical director and orchestrator Aaron Clingham works hard as a (literally) one man band , but the combination of ‘live’ keyboard with other instruments on backing track inevitably means that the music is robbed of a certain amount of immediacy, despite the game, if not always accurate (at least on press night), vocal efforts of the cast.

I really liked Jude St James as the truth-talking best friend who’s a former nurse and James Lowrie brings welcome jolts of energy as the free-spirited Brighton newcomer who hooks-up with the central couple but then rather improbably ends up as Adam’s social media campaign manager when his story garners public attention, and he excels delivering Philip Joel’s choreography. Mali Wen Davies has some highly amusing moments as an emotionally invested close mate.

This feels more like a workshop presentation, albeit one with a run of just under a month, than a fully fledged realisation of what Supersonic Man could be. It’s worth catching to see an ambitious new British musical, one with brains, imagination and heart, in its fledgling state. Chris Burgess is clearly very talented and it is to be hoped that this often charming, sometimes astonishing show gets the development and fine tuning that it deserves.