Revew of the live experience at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith

Mostly useless.

Tempting as it is to leave the review at that, in honour of what  Ford Prefect came up with after 15 years researching Earth’s entry in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, more needs to be said about this endeavour to serve as a warning to anyone thinking of buying tickets. An evening of Vogon poetry-reading would be more entertaining.

This is not a show but an immersive experience, even if the main thing you’ll experience is boredom, mixed with anger and regret that producers and rights-holder Disney could have taken such a massive metaphorical shit on the memory of Douglas Adams, abandoning all his wit, imagination, humanity – and, most importantly, storytelling skills for such a shameless cash grab.  

A few of the familiar elements from what we must now call a franchise  are there, artlessly moulded around a new narrative (far too ambitious a word for what we have here) involving Fenchurch, Arthur Dent’s love interest from later volumes in Adams’s increasingly inaccurately named trilogy of books. But they seem to be used with little love, as if put together by the office bore who thinks it hilarious that 42 is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and anything, but doesn’t really understand why.

Hitchhikers fans will feel disappointed and short-changed, frustrated by how little respect is paid to the original. And newcomers to the franchise will feel disappointed, short-changed AND confused, as references are jammed in with little explanation. And with tickets costing up to £92 for the VIP experience (which includes one cocktail, one pack of branded playing cards as merch, and first pick of the seats in the first room), that’s quite a lot of change to be short by.

We start, as Adams’s story more-or-less did, in the pub  – the first opportunity to buy booze en route – with Ford and Arthur, just discovering that Earth is to be demolished. Fenchurch is also here now and she and Ford have a karaoke battle. I guess a show should start with a song…

We then tootle off to the hold of Zaphod Beeblebrox’s Heart Of Gold – any resemblance to a corridor is purely budgetary. Meanwhile the presidential playboy’s second head of course remains covered – that being a difficult problem for any visual adaptation of Adams’s world – before moving on to the hold of the Vogon destroyer that just blew up Earth. 

Here you’re just left to mull around, though there’s not much to see. A bar (ker-ching!); a merch store (ker-ching!); a tiny bit of set showing where the pen-pushers live. Marvin The Paranoid Android is wandering around – by a galaxy’s length the best thing in the whole experience, a brilliant puppet operated and voiced by Andrew Evans, below, but criminally underused.

I missed the fact that in one corner Arthur was doing something. I think it was a nod to him being a sandwich-maker on the planet of Lamuella in the fifth novel, but there was no indication this was part of the plot. That the headset mics weren’t working at this point  didn’t help attract attention to the scene. Then Arthur acted out a chaste Brief Encounter-type meeting with an on-screen Fenchurch on a railway platform in 1942. This definitely was plot, but what it meant or how it fitted in proved more elusive.

Next, a gospel number in honour of the Great Green Arkleseizure –  a god of snot worshipped by those who fear the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief – a religion not mentioned before or after this fun but flimsy interlude.

Finally we get to meet planet-builder Slartibartfast and wrap up a story you’d be forgiven for not really being aware was going on (Arthur is lovelorn for Fenchurch, in a nutshell) that concludes with some twee platitudes that might well have been ripped from Meghan Markle’s Instagram feed. Life, apparently, is all about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Sadly there’s no such feel of anything extraordinary here, although the cast (of which there is more than one, with a few star names on screen) do their best with the turkey they’ve been given,  especially  in improvising with the audiences as we’re herded from set to set. 

This is Adams’s art repurposed as artless intellectual property to be exploited rather than loved, as authentic as the AI sports footage playing in the bar at the start. You suspect, were he still here, he’d have a lot to say about this 

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy is playing at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, until February 15.

Review date: 8 Dec 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Riverside Studios