An immersive theatrical dining experience inspired by Neil Armstrong’s in-flight menu during his journey to the Moon.
In space, no one can hear your tummy rumble. And on a trip lasting 102 hours, you’re bound to get a little bit peckish. Little Earthquake teamed up with gastronomartist Kaye Winwood to create a delectable dining experience that was truly out of this world.
Rocket Fuel was a 90-minute edible adventure in which our guests joined us for an 8-course theatrical dining experience, taking them to the Moon and back again without ever needing to leave the comfort of their seats.
Guided by our trusty Flight Director, the performance compressed the Apollo 11 mission into a single spectacular event — combining surround sound, projection, live cameras and performers — leading guests all the way from the tense build-up on launch day right through to the celebration parades on the crew’s triumphant return.
At each stage of the astronauts’ journey, our guests were treated to exciting things to eat and drink, inspired by Neil Armstrong’s actual in-flight meal plan and by the dramatic events of the mission itself.
I wrote the script in three or four days at the most
Making Rocket Fuel
It was madness, deciding to make a new mid-scale show in the middle of also curating and presenting our first-ever festival. If we’d known how challenging it would really be, we’d probably never have done it — but naivety is a great enabler, and Rocket Fuel is one of the projects I will always be most proud of.
Neil Armstrong’s in-flight menu wasn’t difficult to find online, and because we’d wanted to collaborate with the amazing gastronomartist Kaye Winwood for ages, the planets really did seem to have aligned when we had this idea. The title was mine. A project rarely feels real for me until I’ve come up with a title, and if there’s any kind of naff pun or retro cultural reference in there, so much the better.
Rocket Fuel was a show which worked brilliantly, more than brilliantly, in spite of all the reasons for it not to, in spite of massive under-budgeting with regards to money, time and personnel, and in spite of the ambitions for the show getting bigger each week as the money and the time ran out. Every single person on the team went above and beyond their hours and their fee to deliver something that was so much greater even than the sum of its formidable parts.
Having hastily watched a few documentaries as rapid research, I think I wrote the script in three or four days at the most. It was all the time we could spare amongst all the other festival preparations. I knew that my main job was to provide bridges between the eight carefully timed courses of Kaye’s magnificent meal, and to set the scene for David, Kay, Barret, Phil and Iain’s incredible set, costume, multimedia, lighting and sound designs to transport the audience to another place and time from the comfort of their seats.
But there is always room for writing to make its own contributions, no matter how subtle or subordinate it’s destined to be. I loved creating new lyrics for “The Cold Song” from Henry Purcell’s 1691 (yes, you read that date right) baroque opera King Arthur, which we turned into a thrilling solo song sung by Michael Collins (played by the wonderful Welsh female performer Sam Frankie Fox) as he floated all on his own in the command module Columbia while Neil and Buzz were down on the lunar surface.
I am especially proud of including one fleeting moment when Neil paused to remember his daughter Karen, who had died in 1962 from a brain tumour at the age of just two. The love and grief and joy and loss and hope and pain for Karen that I imagined Neil felt were, for me, the entire emotional core of the whole Apollo 11 story — the individual human centre of this enormous global event.
Gareth (director) and Marcus (actor) marked this moment beautifully. But even if nobody in the audience ever registered the three-second-long reference, everything I wrote in the script existed in constant relation to one man’s feelings for a child who was mentioned only once in the 90-minute show.
