Through Time and Space: The War of the Worlds’s Legacy
17th March 2026
This note from Andrew Quick, Pete Brooks and Simon Wainwright was written during rehearsals for our digital show programme, which can be found on our War of the Worlds page. It is a brief reflection on where the process was at that point and how the show had sparked into being
H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) has been on the company’s radar for some time. In previous years, we shied away from staging an adaptation because, in our discussions, we always arrived at the problem of how we would ‘do’ the Martians. Wells’s comprehensive representation of the catastrophe that unfolds because of alien invasion also felt like a huge challenge. In short, how could we do justice to the magisterial sweep of the novel and to the symbolic and wider political elements of Wells’s vision.
As we write this, we are in the middle point of our rehearsals, and like the making process in all our adaptations, we are in the welter of problem solving each day. We started off playing with the concept of making a film live on stage. This move to the cinema solved certain problems for us – we could use the cinematic to stage some of the epic moments in the novel and it allowed us to present the Martian presence through the lens of shock and inference, through partial showing and tense-making revelation. It also gave us a framework for creating stage pictures as performers act as camera people and characters, using the trickery of models, props and camera angles to tell a complex story. We have had a lot of fun creating the piece and we hope the humour and energy of our process shine through to our audiences.
This turn to the cinematic and its languages is not merely formal. It also ties our interrogation of Wells’s vison of the breakdown of human society to the wider question of how we engage with media to understand how we situate ourselves in the world. Screens, in all their formats, shape how we think, interact and make decisions. As the novelist Don DeLillo observed:
[Film] is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the
twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside.1
In this sense, the cinematic is a device through which we can get into the mindset of our central protagonist, Will Travers, as he not only faces up to the Martians and the devastation that they unleash but also to the realisation that he and his beliefs have conjured up the world that is disintegrating before him. For us as theatre makers, as I hope you will see and enjoy in the following performance, the cinematic is not just the representation of an image but also a staging of how the image is constructed. Our central protagonist has made the world, and our staging reveals that he must suffer the
consequences of this construction.
When we began working on our adaptation, we learned that Wells had been responding to the invasion literature of the late nineteenth century, to the devastating results of colonial acquisition of lands on indigenous peoples, and to the terrifying technological developments in modern warfare. He claimed the novel had an element of irony and satire that drew from the writing of Jonathan Swift, and we have attempted to incorporate some of these traits in our own version.
There seem to be so many unsettling connections between the novel and current anxieties and realities and these have directly fed into the show you are about to witness. Our War of the Worlds is set in 1968 because, as a company, we always like a bit of critical and historical distance. And although framed by the 1960s it is, like all history plays, an exploration of our contemporary condition. We hope you enjoy our staging and radical retelling of Wells’s original. Although we have changed many things, we have attempted to follow elements of the novel’s structure and events, drawing heavily on Wells’s sensibility to tell a story that we feel is important today.
Many thanks for coming to see the show.
Andrew Quick, Simon Wainwright and Pete Brooks
- Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Knopf, 1982), p.200. ↩︎
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