Anna Burnside reviews 'an ambitious and worthwhile piece of work.'
Clement and Aspinall are in a bell tower in rural Oxfordshire, some unspecified time in the future. In the face of climate meltdown, superstition and religion are both appealing. There is a belief - completely unfounded judging by the cataclysmic rain outside - that ringing church bells prevents lightning.
The intimate setting is well chosen. The two characters are in the tiny belfry, well suggested by the Roundabout tent. Their intimate knowledge of every medieval-sounding village and every neighbour who has been “frazzled” perfectly evokes a world that has abandoned modernity and reverted to a more primitive way of life.
Daisy Hall’s first play, a finalist in last year’s Women’s Prize for Playwrighting, is a brave attempt at a rarely attempted subject. Her imagined consequences - plagues of fish, invasive mushrooms including one growing on Clement’s shoulder - are both biblical and all too possible.
Luke Rollason is an engaging, irreverent Clement with Paul Adeyefa as his more earnest childhood friend. But Hall neither commits to black humour nor finds a dramatic route out of the Beckettian rabbit hole of nothing really happening.
But it’s still an ambitious and worthwhile piece of work, and it will be great to see what Hall does next.
Bellringers performs at the Roundabout at Summerhall from 1315-1420 until August 26, 2024 (no performance on the 13th or 20th).
RSS