Review: Fog Everywhere (Camden People's Theatre)

Fog Everywhere, a freshly devised show courtesy of Camden People's Theatre and the Lung Biology Group at King’s College, looks simultaneously both forwards and backwards. While referring to the smog-filled Victorian London of the nineteenth century, it also serves as a portent for a world to come, where air pollution in London reaches oppressively dense levels.

The show begins with eight young Londoners coming on stage, breathing, slowly, before having a competition to see who can blow the biggest balloon in one puff. These balloons are measured, the actors are ranked. A hierarchy is formed. Those with the best lungs are commended. Without a single word being said we as an audience all become conscious of our own lungs, the quality of our own respiration. We become conscious of something we normally take for granted.

But Fog Everwhere is more than simply a rail against our obliviousness towards pollutants. It rapidly escalates through a variety of set pieces, and the vast majority of the 65-minute runtime doesn't discuss the causes of air pollution, but instead how this is more than a one-dimensional issue. People don't actively avoid being green for no reason, and pollution has to be considered in a wider social context. For instance, it's hard to make short trips by foot rather than use a car (as the public are often told to do) when your neighbourhood streets aren't safe.

Being environmentally friendly isn’t easy for all, and clean air is fast becoming a privileged concept – as one passage explains, it seems reserved for those willing or able to pay for it ('like bottled water'). As the cast brilliantly poses to us in a grime riff-off halfway through the performance, why should we prioritise a pollution epidemic over a crime epidemic.

With the variety of interwoven issues creating such an elaborate piece, it takes the deft touch of Camden People's Theatre artistic director, Brian Logan, to make sure the clarity is maintained while the vibrancy of the performance remains consistent. The show fluidly jumps from one debate to another, with the cast leaping from a capella cow chorus to grime rap with ease, in what ends up being a form-busting experience.

But the ace in the hole here is the cast, capable of giving a rawness and vibrant realism to these issues. They allow the text to be didactic without ever feeling preachy, using humour and speedy shifts in tone to push the discourse along. Tobi Bakare and William Mokori, given perhaps the most to do, play to the audience perfectly and create an endearing portrait of modern youth. These issues matter to them – resolutions to cut emissions by 2040 are frustrating if pollutants and noxious fumes are already having an impact now.

Towards the end of the show we’re told how, in 1952, over 4000 people died as a result of a coal-smoke saturated fog. The anecdote is a startling one for the show to pick up on – it makes us feel as though, given our current crisis, we’re living in a city slowly sliding back into a murky, hazy past. An unsettling message, delivered with deft surety.

Fog Everywhere runs at Camden People's Theatre until 11 November.