Review by Dan Sinclair
⭐️⭐️
Two scruffy men, caught in a borderline homoerotic friendship is a surprisingly regular staple of absurdist drama. Every Rosencrantz needs his Guildenstern, a Vladamir his Estragon and Daisy Hall’s Bellringers brings us a new pair of boys with extravagant names: Aspinall and Clement. A finalist for the 2023 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, Bellringers transfers home from the Edinburgh Fringe to the Hampstead Theatre for a production that asks us a simple question: what would you do if the world was ending - like actually ending?
It’s sometime between the twelfth and eighteenth century, Aspinall and Clement come rushing into the bell tower to take shelter from the storm outside. It’s the biblical end of days, lightning regularly strikes people dead, mushrooms are taking over the earth, the water is turning red and women are giving birth to rabbits. The two bell ringers have one job, to ring the bells and clear the storm when the time comes - making them a target for God’s wrath. The two spend their time pondering all the people they’ve lost and whether there is any end in sight. A stylish script from Daisy Hall invokes ideas of the climate emergency and our ever-delicate world and has us consider the part we can play in addressing it. Whilst thematically interesting, as a live performance it just isn’t all that engaging.
As our first bell ringer Aspinall, Paul Adeyefa is God-fearing and pragmatic and would rather do anything than ring those bells. He is sage-like in his knowledge of the mushrooms and the outside apocalypse, yet he doesn’t want to do anything about it. Adeyefa’s performance is delicate, but he doesn’t have much to actually do. His dialogue is poetic and ponderous, the text is easy on the ears but nothing particularly happens until the final 15 minutes. As his opposite, Luke Rollason plays Clement, a more emotionally clued-up bell ringer. The troubles of the world strike him in the heart rather than the head, leading to a handful of touching scenes between the two.
The direction proved to be uneven throughout, feeling that clown came first and character second. The play attempts to tackle some big hitters and is deeply philosophical in its aims, but the delivery of Rollason and Adeyefa often buried this, resulting in two performances that were neither comedic nor affecting. I felt myself becoming frustrated - on paper this was my ideal show but it felt lacking in any meaningful commentary on the state of the world itself, instead trying to land a joke the second it came close to moving an audience member. The simplicity of the lighting design never quite felt as apocalyptic as it could, not capturing the sense that the bell tower itself could collapse in under the weight of an airborne devil fish at any moment.
At the start, our two bellringers come rushing into the bell tower to shelter from the biblical and neverending storm outside. About halfway through the play, I began to think - why didn’t they start the play inside the bell tower? In this Godot-like world, the dramatic potential you could gain from having your two characters hold out in one location for their entire lives is immense. In fact, this fear of the outside world is crucial to the story so why not take advantage of this? An audience can no longer imagine the horrors outside and contemplate whether they are true or not.
As a lament on the state of our terrifying world, Bellringers finds an absurd and kooky way that will undoubtedly make many an audience member dance on the edge of existential crisis. In a marmite production that seems to have divided opinion, I, unfortunately, was not won over by Bellringers. That said, Ellie Keel Productions are a trailblazing production company with a string of successes and Daisy Hall is clearly an exciting new voice which we will be hearing more from in the future - it is just sad that on this occasion, for me at least, Bellringers just didn’t ring true.
Bellringers is playing at Hampstead Theatre until 2nd November.
Photos by Alex Brenner
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