Written by Daisy Hall

Directed by Jessica Lazar

Review by Jack Quinn

ROUNDABOUT @ Summerhall: Tickets

Bells can be heard ringing from the Summerhall courtyard, is it the final call for a show, or perhaps noise bleed from Paines Plough’s Roundabout which is host to the premiere of Daisy Hall’s Bellringers, shortlisted for the Women’s Playwrighting Award.

Bellringers is an allusive, dystopian play which follows Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) as they await their task of ringing the bells to subdue the approaching storm with the risk of their lives. In style, Bellringers connects to the lineage of the vagrants of Waiting for Godot and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but with more pressing concerns of the impending doom of the end of the world. Where Beckett’s duo await a futile resolve from a barren spiritual wasteland, Clement and Aspinall’s monotony exists within a pressure cooker of spending the last hour of their lives together.

There is a despair central to this play which provides little hope, yet final acts of human sacrifice and love cling on at the brink of destruction. We exist within Clement and Aspinall’s world, with little sense of the outside world, except for the fact that it has been raining fish and that there are threatening fungal growths, leaving us without answers for what has sparked this armageddon, clinging to allusions of the ongoing climate disaster.

Knotty, gritty and obscure, Bellringers is a beautiful story of friendship, sacrifice, and destiny, played out with a sense of the bleak oncoming doom of the apocalypse as each thunder groan approaches.

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