Goodness. What a devilish delight that Grim is. Ellen Grimshaw plays Grim, an alien who gets pushed off their Mum's spaceship on their way to Data Collection Headquarters in Hollywood, landing in a Pepsi ad audition in Carlton. What? Yup. It's extremely ridiculous but if you accept it and move on, you get to really enjoy the performance by Grimshaw, the absurd humour and the chance to consider what the cost of always trying to please people can be.
Grimshaw is superb in this role. She completely gives herself over to Grim with the stuttering voice, the physicality and the outlandish red costume with accompanying wig. The alien language that she creates might sound like a bunch of nonsense but it genuinely feels like she's gone and made a specific noise for its equivalent English word, and whether she has or not is beside the point as it is still works on that level.
Once upon a time there was an alien called Natalie. Or Nat to his friends. Nat informs us that it's this thing that these alien creatures do where they shorten names for their friends as a term of affection and we wouldn't understand because we are human. And so we enter the whimsical storytelling world of Stuart Bowden with his new show When Our Molecules Meet Again* Let’s Hope They Remember What to Do *Probably in Space.
We follow Nat as he arrives on Earth and hear the alien's observations on the nature of humans and their peculiar behaviours and way of thinking. This leads Nat to begin questioning his own thoughts on life, death and everything in between, particularly after meeting up with his alien nemesis Sammy. There's a playful nature to Nat's personality but it's also laced with melancholy and loneliness that's demonstrated through some singing and music.
There's an overarching theme in When Our Molecules Meet... of not sweating over the little stuff and accepting what happens in life. Bowden further emphasises this idea by having Nat reading his own story to us off a script. Despite this being his own personal account of what happened, there are numerous moments when Nat loses his place and anxiously tries to locate where he's up to or his looping pedals and sound don't work quite the way they should so he goes back and re-does the line.
No matter how prepared we are for something or how confident we feel, there's always the possibility that it won't go according to plan and how we react to it is what shapes who we become. Nat's deadpan reactions to the earlier mentioned difficulties in the show become his most endearing quality.
