Bellringers at Roundabout Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe review

Daisy Hall’s Women’s Prize for Playwriting finalist Bellringers is a tricky piece to nail your flag to. Caught somewhere between the world’s impending global warming disaster and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Hall’s play veers in tone between light workplace comedy and impending apocalyptic cataclysm. Trapped between tones, it is a work that does not land either and drifts disappointingly. The end of the world has never felt so flat.

In a steeple in rural Oxfordshire, where only fields separate villages with mythic names, two cassock-wearing friends Clement and Aspinall debate whether to ring the bells, which may stop the storm but could ‘frazzle’ them in the meantime. Like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot, the journey is in detention, as these two men pass the time, kicking their heels, talking about those in the village they once have known, the piece has a whimsy air that feels deliberately incongruent with Holly Khan’s effective rattling sound design as the storm continues to rage around them.

Yet while Beckett made something of nothing happening (twice), Bellringers is trapped in needing to stop the action for a play to emerge. Clement and Aspinall, do not put much faith in prayer, yet talk and talk rather than ring the bell that may end the apocalypse. Fish rain down from the sea; mushrooms grow around them at terrifying speed and yet still the ringing of the bell is put off.

Luke Rollason and Paul Adeyefa are capable performers caught up in a production by Jessica Lazer that leaves them somewhat directionless. Rollason is the more nervous, and Adeyefa the more grounded, as they bicker and make up over and over again. In a slightly larger space, the piece could have somewhere to go, but it ends up feeling awkward, an interesting premise with nowhere to go.