Invasion, Replacement and Colonial Anxiety in The War of the Worlds

Abstract

British novelist Herbert George Wells’ 1897 science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds is a story about an invasion of the planet Earth by extraterrestrial beings. The novel is Wells’ reaction to his firsthand witnessing of the horrors of British colonialism. Seeing what travesties humans were capable of inflicting on other humans, the story is a projection of colonial anxiety. On 30 October 1938, American theatre director and filmmaker Orson Welles, along with adapter Howard Koch and the actors of the Mercury Theatre, performed H. G. Wells’ nineteenth-century science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds as a radio play. Infamous in its reception, the 1938 broadcast was an early example of so-called ‘fake news’. On 9–13 March 2022 the University of Missouri Department of Theatre (USA) staged a theatrical version of The War of the Worlds, using the script from the 1938 radio play. I had the privilege of directing the show alongside a culturally diverse production team and cast. The concept behind the MU production was to utilize decolonial strategies of production in order to cut through ‘fakeness’, and explicate connections between the story and colonial anxieties. We attempted to expose the means of the production of the false narrative through the utilization of anti-racist and anti-sexist directing strategies, and Brechtian theatrical techniques. This essay is an exploration of how our production elucidated the themes of invasion and replacement in the original novel, the radio broadcast and the contemporary version. This analysis reveals the multitude ways in which fantasies of an alien invasion is rooted in the same colonial anxieties that are driving a widespread state of cultural unrest today, and suggests some strategies for making theatre that attempts to ease some of these anxieties. Directors who produce theatre must constantly read ‘against the grain’ of colonial anxieties.