Imitating the Dog: War of the Worlds at Lowry

Alien invasion stories are so embedded in our cultural DNA that it’s easy to forget where many of the tropes began. Tripods. Heat rays. Cities in flames. H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds remains the blueprint – a tale of catastrophe that has shaped more than a century of apocalyptic fiction.

At Lowry, “multimedia daredevils” imitating the dog return with a bold retelling that leans into both the scale and the strangeness of Wells’s vision. Four performers step on stage armed with cameras and begin constructing an epic road movie in real time. Miniature environments, model worlds and camera trickery combine with live performance and projection, blurring the line between the filmed and the physical, the intimate and the immense.

It’s a story we think we know: extraterrestrial lifeforms descend from the skies, societal order collapses, and desperate crowds flee through smoking ruins. But imitating the dog have a habit of making old stories like this feel newly made. By making a film live on stage, they find a way not only to stage the novel’s vastness but to reveal how catastrophe itself is constructed. We watch the image being built even as the world within it falls apart.

Set in 1968 – a period chosen for its critical distance – this version looks back in order to look squarely at the present. Wells’s original was steeped in anxieties about empire, technological warfare and societal fragility. Those tensions haven’t disappeared; they’ve evolved.

Following acclaimed adaptations of Heart of Darkness, Dracula, Macbeth and Frankenstein, the company once again fuse live performance with digital innovation to create theatre that is as visually inventive as it is intellectually restless. This is The War of the Worlds not as nostalgic spectacle, but as a live, precarious act of storytelling.