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.
Watching Nation—a new play written and performed by Sam Ward, debuting at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe—it feels like watching a horror story. When you enter the theatre (Summerhall’s excellent Roundabout space), a soundscape (by Carmel Smickersgill) of scraping metal periodically plays, establishing a certain uneasy foreboding before the performance has even started.
And then the story begins, with the discovery of a bloodied dead body splayed out on a small town’s high street. Together with Ward’s genuinely and effectively creepy storytelling, you find yourself expecting jump scares and supernatural monsters at every turn.
But Nation isn’t a horror play, not really. You could almost call it mundane for how frequently, how casually its events play out in cities and towns across the world on the daily. Or does that actually make it scarier?
Let’s backtrack. Things really get going when Ward's narrator backtracks to six months before that grizzly discovery, at a retirement party for a longtime employee of the local museum. Everything is lovely until suddenly, an uninvited, unknown stranger appears at the door, bathed in an ominous orange light. This is a town, Ward has told us, where everyone knows everyone’s name. Newcomers don’t come around often. They also might not be exactly welcome.
And yet, the lady of the evening, whose retirement is being celebrated, feels somehow compelled to invite in this mysterious stranger. Simultaneously, her husband is in the backyard looking for their son who has wandered into an unnaturally dark corner of their garden. When the tyke finally emerges, he’s carrying a lump of grass that somehow is suddenly plastic.
But that’s only the beginning. In the weeks following, thing begin disappearing all over town. Streetlights, roads, roofs, and eventually even entire buildings—not merely stolen, but fully disappeared, as if they were never there at all. And as the town begins to strategize on how to address this problem, they suddenly realize that all these troubles began the night that mysterious stranger arrived and moved into the spare room of that family’s house. That retiree better do something about that stranger, she’s told, or this is likely to get worse. Spooked yet?
The problem with Nation is that it doesn’t take long to catch on to the metaphor being made. This small town (Ward tells us it’s any small town) is fixated on things staying the way they are. Its residents enjoy belonging to a community, each with their own role. They like their little routines, their friends, and family just as they’ve known them as long as they can remember. Outsiders bring change, and suddenly things aren’t the way they were when these people grew up. And that can lead to some nasty rhetoric—or even murder.
What makes the play work is how effective Ward’s storytelling is, and the novel concept of how his story is told. Sometimes he is a narrator, and we are an audience in a theatre. Other times, we are the citizens of this town (both generally and specifically—don’t sit on the front row if you don’t want a role). And he’s clear: This is any town. And we enjoy belonging together, both as citizens of this play’s locale and as an audience and the performer we’ve come to watch. Ward keeps the audience in the palm of his hand with expert and sometimes terrifying precision, drawing everyone into the increasingly spooky story in a way that drives us to understand or even (dare I say) empathize with the climactic slaying.
At the same time, I’m not sure that all of it adds up to much. Keep things the way they are versus progress and change is one of the oldest stories in the book. Where Nation succeeds is showing how that old, mundane trope is truly a horror story, a disturbing bit of human nature that makes this world a worse place every time it plays out. Sometimes, the real-world results are as violent as this play’s climax, or worse.
Either way, Ward’s performance—and by extension his writing, too—is so compelling, so arresting, that you’re with him and nearly on the edge of your seat until the very end, even if you’ve gotten there a little bit before he has.
Nation is playing at Summerhall’s Roundabout through August 26. For tickets, click here. See photos from Nation below.
Sam Ward in Nation
Sam Ward in Nation
Sam Ward in Nation
Sam Ward in Nation
Sam Ward in Nation
Sam Ward in Nation
