Writer: Rachael Dowsett
Rachael Dowsett’s new 60-minute play Please Shoot the Messenger is a rare and slightly surrealist character piece disguised in a plot-driven drama about plague and kings’ curses that is high on energy but gets a bit lost in the post. Focusing on several messenger characters who serve royal households and high-born folk, the focus on physical comedy and a series of over-extended scenarios misses an opportunity to also look at the status of servants living off their master’s glory and how vital they really are to the running of the state.
Newly appointed as official messenger to the Blue-Eyed King, the unnamed herald is sneered at by many who think them unworthy of the role. With a deadly virus killing subjects within five days and currently threatening the life of the heir to the throne, the King tasks his messenger with travelling to the greatest minds in the kingdom to find a cure while deliberately dismissing his employee’s apothecary skills.
Please Shoot the Messenger has a promising structure, a series of conversations with those doing similar jobs who share information that will help the protagonist deliver the king’s requirements in the hope of lifting a curse that ends the employment of every messenger within 90 days. A series of Beckettian encounters takes place with equivalent envoys from the French Dauphin (with tennis balls in a floating reference to Henry V) and Scottish King, as well as one in love with a high-born woman. But each of these situations, though performed with comic exaggeration by Dowsett, contributes very little to the forward narrative or to understanding the beleaguered life of the official messenger.
Some of the staging devices are intriguingly surreal, including the pointy, subservient creature that the messenger becomes in the presence of the King (a voiceover), projecting the insignificance with which they are perceived by their royal master. But these encounters and shifts last too long, each highly pitched character rambling into tangents that make the story difficult to follow for the audience. There is a decision to be made by the writer-performer about the purpose of the show; to be loosely connected and bizarre for its own sake, focused on developing exaggerated characters, or to be plot-driven, finding a cure for the plague and expanding more on the messenger’s own skill.
Performed at the Hope Theatre as part of Camden Fringe 2025, there is much more to learn about the protagonist and why they have chosen this role instead of trading on their advanced medical knowledge. The audience never learns why they rose to this illustrious position so soon or why they are perceived as silly and uninformed by the wider population – a statement made but never reinforced through drama. What does Please Shoot the Messenger want to say about the disregard of royalty for those that sustain them, the misapplication of class and knowledge or the vital strands of international relations carried in the hands of those that society barely recognises? Hopefully, the second post will deliver more clarity.
Reviewed on 15 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
