The Moonwalkers. Lightroom.

The Lightroom, the cube-like, subterranean, four-storey show-space in King’s Cross designed by award-winning production company 59 Productions, had a hit with its recent exhibition, David Hockney: Bigger and Closer. Equipped with the latest digital projection and audio technology, the venue’s stellar new production The Moonwalkers: A Journey With Tom Hanks combines original film, still images, animation, and spectacular light and sound effects to retell the story of the Apollo missions to the moon. The result is an engrossing, uplifting, and technically flawless 50-minute spectacle that owes as much to theatre as it does documentary.

Written by Tom Hanks and Christopher Riley, The Moonwalkers tracks the history of humanity’s relationship with the moon and offers an historical context for Kernnedy’s 1962 “We choose to go to the Moon” speech. It also sketches out the unprecedented logistical feat of bringing 500,000 people together over a ten-year period to deliver the Apollo project. It is stimulating and engaging history lesson assisted by interviews with astronauts from NASA’s current Artemis programme (aimed at the return of crewed missions to the moon this decade), spirited narration from Hanks, and evocative original music from Anne Nikitin.

Where the show really stands out however, and one supposes where the production designers had the most fun, is in capturing the astronaut’s experiences on the journey to and on the planet’s surface. The sound of thunderous rocket engines engulf the cavernous show-space which, by happenstance, is around about the same size as the original mission control in Houston. The feeling of being alone in space is evoked by a star-scape projected not just on four walls, but on the floor below.

Dozens of iconic images, including Buzz Aldrin’s boot print in the lunar dust and William Anders’ Earthrise have been exquisitely remastered to produce images of ethereal beauty, even when projected against 12 metre high walls. Panoramic images stitched together from dozens of separate photos create a 360-degree view of the moon surface, with the audience at its epicentre.

The aim here is to enable people to see exactly what the astronauts saw, and it works: this is as close as most of us will ever get to the feeling of setting foot on the lunar surface. As an exemplar of how new visual technologies and ideas can facilitate extraordinarily immersive storytelling The Moonwalkers entirely convinces. If there is a flaw, it is that sometimes there is simply too much to take in. This show is, literally, awesome.

Writers: Tom Hanks and Christopher Riley

Directors: Nick Corrigan and Lysander Ashton