The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!
As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
Mushrooms—represented by bright, golden, and sudden spots of light—have appeared in the bell tower. They're on benches, on backs. And these particular mushrooms, it seems, have created a tangled web, choking and cannibalizing the earth underneath our feet. It's one of many signs of the end of the world.
There have been other signs: ever-growing storms, two-headed lambs, heavy rains of fish, fire, brimstone, 14 rabbits and a cat born to a human woman. High above the chaos and confusion are Clement (played by Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa), old friends begging for mercy in the belfry.
Bellringers, a Finalist for the Women’s Prize in Playwriting from Daisy Hall, is a fanciful yet emotional cry out for our climate. What do you do when you find yourself faced with the end of the world? For Clement and Aspinall, they ring the bells, a childlike and charming reaction to shocking claps of lighting and deep rumbles of thunder. If they ring the bells, the boys believe, the storm dispels.
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Staged by Jessica Lazar in Summerhall’s Roundabout space, Clement and Aspinall grapple with the inevitability of their demise. The ropes with which they’ll ring the bells hang overhead like nooses. David Doyle’s inventive lighting darkening, brightening, and twinkling as the storm that surrounds them ebbs and flows. And as the storm draws nearer, the two must reckon with whether or not their bellringing makes any difference at all.
Hall’s play reads like a response to a famous post-war poem. If the guards are gone, who is watching over us? If the nurses need nursing, who can dress their wounds? If the last priest has finally been called to a heavenly home, who presides over his funeral? If there is no one to ring the bell, in warning, in blind hope, will the tiny town be caught in an endless storm? What is the role of duty and responsibility in the apocalypse?
The text is an answer in the form of a chime. Hall seems to be arguing that the only storm that can be weathered is one we wrestle together. In the face of an ever-increasing sense of futility, each of us has a job to do to keep hope alive. Perhaps the apple core lodged into a field will produce trees we’ll never see. And perhaps those trees will bear fruit that will nourish someone we’ll never meet.
Even if the end is near, shan’t we go not silently, but with the defiant ringing of a bell?
Bellringers runs in the ROUNDABOUT at Summerhall through August 26. Get tickets here. See photos below.
Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa in Bellringers
Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa in Bellringers
Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa in Bellringers
Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa in Bellringers
Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa in Bellringers
Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa in Bellringers
Luke Rollason in Bellringers
Luke Rollason in Bellringers
Paul Adeyefa and Luke Rollason in Bellringers
Paul Adeyefa in Bellringers
