HAVE you ever gone through the button-pressing selection process of your phone banking system or a call to a government agency and thought “this would make a good basis for a theatre production”? No? Me neither.

However, necessity is, as the saying goes, the mother of invention. With playhouses still depressingly dark due to the pandemic, a group of four dramatists working under the aegis of Glasgow’s Tron Theatre hit upon the idea of making a work of telephonic theatre.

The outcome of this unusual idea is Hotline, a piece of distanced, recorded drama that was inspired by the famous phone call that astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong made from the moon to soon-to-be disgraced President Richard Nixon in the White House. When one makes the cosmic phone call to 0808 1968619 (which is, surprisingly, given the distance involved, entirely free), one is immediately transported, not only to the moon, but back to July 20, 1969, and the aftermath of the

moon landing.

You can enjoy the excitement of Aldrin and Armstrong’s Nasa colleagues as the famous duo reach their destination, if that’s your thing. Or maybe you’d rather scoff at the hyperbolical ravings of Nixon or enjoy the strains of the late, great Gil Scott-Heron’s gloriously satirical song Whitey On The Moon.

Whatever your preference is, you won’t have long, as this introductory, sonic medley soon gives way to the dulcet tones of Oxmo, your interplanetary phone operator. She it is who will guide you through your call, complete with, in all honesty, strictly limited press-button options (expect to dial mainly one or two).

As she does so, one encounters a variety of stellar interruptions. These include a radio advert for Elon Musk’s colony on Mars and a surprisingly close to copyright infringement item called an “ExBox” (which is literally a box in which you jettison your ex-partner’s personal effects into outer space).

THAT, I’m sad to report, is about as funny as the comic strand in Hotline gets. There is, however, more to be said for the politico-historical strain in the piece.

Did you know, for instance, that, when Nasa selected Aldrin, Armstrong and Michael Collins (not, as Irish actor Meghan Tyler is quick to inform us, his namesake, the Irish Republican leader who was assassinated in 1922) for the Apollo 11 mission, they overlooked 13 trained female astronauts? Or were you aware that the first woman in space was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who orbited the Earth 48 times on a solo mission in 1963?

Such Wikipedia-style snippets of information are interesting and worth knowing. They’re certainly preferable to the supposedly humorous, and regular, singing of “Ride, Sally, Ride!” after we’ve been informed that the first American woman, and first known LGBT person in space, was Sally Ride in 1983.

Enemies of so-called “woke” culture are best advised to give this piece a miss. It wears its progressive, identity-politics credentials pretty proudly on its spacesuit. For instance, if your button pressing choices take you into a black hole, you’re likely to be told that “we’ve escaped the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy”.

Right on! But is Hotline any good?

There, I’m afraid, is the rub. The work has, in fairness, attempted to do something pretty audacious. There’s a very good reason why locked-down theatre artists have been using computers and smartphones, rather than old-fashioned phone calls, as their artistic outlet.

Despite their best, and valiant, efforts, the Tron team has, sadly, produced a pretty flat, disappointingly uneven hotchpotch.

Hotline continues until March 6 tron.co.uk