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Dark Sublime review – Marina Sirtis enters parallel sci-fi universe

Trafalgar Studios, London
The Star Trek actor plays a fading TV star in a play that blends giddy pastiche with affecting ruminations on fame and fandom

It will come as no great shock to Star Trek: The Next Generation fans that Marina Sirtis, who played the much-loved Empath Deanna Troi, is an actress with real heart. It isn’t a faultless performance (sometimes the lines feel shaky) and Michael Dennis’s debut play is a fairly juddery, flippant one minute and extravagantly emotional the next. But Sirtis is genuinely moving as a near-forgotten actress whose star is on the wane, and Dennis writes passionately about television’s ability to transport us to another dimension and forget ourselves for a while.

Andrew Keates directs with a palpable sense of mischief and affection. Scenes from Dark Sublime, the sci-fi show that made Marianne famous, play out between the “real” scenes from Marianne’s later life. Tim McQuillen-Wright’s neatly drawn domestic set gives over to sci-fi silliness: the coffee table becomes a neon-lit control panel; the door turns into a rainbow-coloured robot gleefully voiced by Mark Gatiss, and Simon Thorp bounds about the stage, eyebrows wiggling and voice booming – our very silly sci-fi hero for the night.

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