Nation at Summerhall – Edinburgh Fringe review

YESYESNONO, the theatre company headed by performer Sam Ward, are certainly making all the right kind of waves. Previous shows – including we were promised honey! and The Accident Did Not Take Place – provided a playful moment of communal storytelling, deftly repeated once more here.

Utilising direct address, Ward weaves a juicy initial set of scenes in a fictional town: a body found on a busy high street. A party disrupted by an unexpected arrival. A child in a garden clawing at a mysterious hole. He draws on a few neat inspirations – with his sing-song, placid narration, an obvious comparison is Tim Crouch, but that feels more like a departure point than anything else; other times it feels as though Ward is concocting his own John Wyndham novel on-stage, unspooling the plot beats of a supernatural thriller.

As he has been doing for over half a decade now, Ward prises open that tender, sometimes fragile link between spectator and performer. Acting as pseudo-casting director, he picks out audience members to signify different figures in the town – the butcher, the baker, the troublemaker. Gradually, this creates a sense of repetitive ease – a lull into a naturally false sense of security.

Nods to national discourse become more explicit as the show progresses – marshalling a sense of our own complicit place in this fabricated community. It finds the ideal meeting point between state of the nation, state of imagination and state of imagined nation, circling a gut punch that feels inevitable and tragically foreseeable.

I doubt you’d find a better play to watch at 10.30am – a caffeine shot of experimentalism that makes for a perfect early-morning offering.

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