03/08/24

Roundabout at Summerhall, Edinburgh

Two figures, hooded and shrouded, stumble in out of the torrential rain and prepare themselves for a spot of campanology. But who are they? My first intimation is that they are monks and this piece must be set back in the day, but the cloaks are quickly removed and the two men are revealed to be contemporary characters – yet the world they discuss is bewildering. What’s all this talk of raining frogs? Death by lightning? And why are mushrooms growing everywhere?

Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) and Clement (Luke Rollason) are the latest in a line of bellringers, who come here in the belief that ringing the church bells might somehow dispel the devastating storm they know is fast approaching. There have been other bellringers before them but it’s a worryingly short-lived profession. Best not to talk too much about what happened to their predecessors. Neither of them are religious – not really – but they have to do something don’t they? And a respected friend claims that this is the only surefire way to avert disaster.

As the two men count the intervals between lightning strikes and thunderbolts, which grow worryingly shorter, they talk about this baffling world in which they’re trying to survive – this doomed place of dying crops and terrible famines and weather conditions that seem to be spinning out of control…

It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to interpret this particular allegory, but the power of Bellringers is in the uncanny way in which information is slowly but surely released, so that things only fully coalesce in the play’s final stretches. Both Adeyefa and Rollason play their roles with consummate skill, the former calm and measured, the latter nervy and intense, tortured by a secret he’s been keeping for over a year. Daisy Hall’s acerbic script is at once funny and terrifying, highlighting the futility of a world that puts its faith in superstition and crossed fingers. In the end, all the two men have ever wanted is “what they had – an ordinary life. And long.” A damning reference the world that we are all in the process of bequeathing to generations yet to come.

Little wonder that this debut play was a finalist for The Women’s Prize 2023. Under Jessica Lazar’s assured direction this is another winner from Roundabout, one that will send you out of that unique location with a lot to think about.

4.5 stars

Philip Caveney