Writer: James Rowland
When NASA’s deep space exploration probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched to photograph Jupiter and Saturn and then fly off into the void between the stars, they carried with them two golden discs of music, sounds and greetings that attempted to sum up who we are as a planet.
Famed astronomer and science communicator led the team to assemble the recordings. While doing so, he fell in love with fellow team member Ann Druyan, with whom he spent the rest of his life. It’s a romantic tale, especially when told in James Rowland’s typically exuberant, breathless style. And then, just as we revel in the romanticism of two soulmates finding each other, Rowland introduces a kicker. At the time, Sagan was married to someone else.
There’s a point here about the stories we tell and what we leave out of them. That infuses the other strands of Rowland’s hour with us, too. It’s there in tales of how he fell in love with his partner, Fran Bushe, with long phone calls through the night during Covid lockdown – only to find later that Fran had omitted how she cannot stand being on the telephone.
And it’s also there in the central strand of this weaving tale, a reinterpretation of the myth of Robin Hood. This is “the first time I’m sharing a story I haven’t made up,” he quips, although, in the finest traditions of oral history and folk storytelling, there are embellishments all his own.
Rowland thinks about the legend and what it says about the Britain we want to believe in – and also what has been left out. Assuming Robin Hood existed, such an accomplished bowman would have been conscripted into King Richard’s crusades, where he would have witnessed some of the most horrific acts of genocide meted out in the monarch’s name.
So while the traditional tale of Robin Hood appearing at an archery tournament in disguise and winning a seemingly unwinnable contest remains, this is a version of the story where PTSD plays a role, where the hand holding Marian’s never quite stops trembling.
But while such touches introduce new elements of pathos into the story, Rowland’s anarchic humour is threaded through. His version of Nottingham has all the locals played by acting royalty, with Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Miriam Margolyes all name-checked.
There’s music, too, played in by Rowland, from classical pieces to early demo tracks by Regina Spektor and Frightened Rabbit. It is a little haphazard at times, as Rowland jumps between story tracks covered by (admittedly hilarious) non-sequiturs. But his ability to present his tale as if it’s off the cuff, cued up by scrawled notes on scraps of paper, is, one senses, finely cultivated.
Rowland’s reinterpretation of the Sherwood myth ends with Robin shooting a golden arrow across the forest canopy. The parallel to the golden record across Voyager isn’t laboured, but it is there: it is a signal of hope, of destiny, forged in love.
James Rowland doesn’t die at the end of the show, thank goodness. Perhaps Robin Hood has – or at least, our original idea of what that legend represents is no more. In its place is a new version, forever on a journey with that golden arrow. Like the disc travelling between the stars, both the myth and its constant reinvention represent what we are and could be.
Continues until 25 January 2025
