Writer and Director: James Callás Ball
We all believe the Earth is round, right? But that is not the case for ‘Flat Earther’ Greg, and his pair of followers Sophie and Kevin, whose meeting in a gastropub is the setting for this neat comedy three-hander.
James Callás Ball’s script is a gentle ribbing of such conspiracy theories and theorists. The play centres around the trio who, under Greg’s (Jamie Kenna) stewardship, are the three members of Brighton’s flat earth society, meeting in a pub, swapping conspiracies and planning for an exciting TV opportunity, all the while awaiting a new, fourth member, who may or may not arrive. Ball’s writing does well not to write off these characters as conspiracy loons, instead doing just enough over the piece’s 70 minutes to make each one more than just a sum of madcap theories.
Kenna’s Greg, desperate to hold the group together, is terribly fraught. A middle-aged, downtrodden husband turned YouTuber (one of many media platforms Greg humorously labels ‘The YouTube), Greg’s keenness for conspiracy is a nice guise for his dismantling homelife. Kenna weaves this well into his portrayal. Greg’s exasperation at Kevin’s (John Black) lack of research, and Sophie’s (Valerie Antwi) supposed treachery are amusingly revealed, flinging in snappy one-liners while passionately defending his flat earth beliefs.
Black’s Kevin is a nice contrast. Kevin, whose eye for Sophie keeps him coming back to the group, is a little more cartoonish to begin with, but settles down, and it is through him that the play grapples, briefly, with the social cost of engaging with such conspiracies. Antwi’s Sophie works well to bounce off Kevin, striving for something more from her beliefs. Antwi handles this deftly, matching the pair’s quips with some cutting lines herself, while also assuredly putting forward her own desires for her voice and conspiracies to be heard. There is room for a small love interest plotline between Kevin and Sophie, which is a little too obvious and probably not entirely necessary, given the existing tensions between the characters.
Ball’s script thrives because it does not punch down. Conspiracy theorists are easy targets, but the well-researched script excavates humour from the topic rather than simply poking fun. It is a daft, short play that handles more than just where the edge of the world is, but it does so in a good-natured way, with the jokes mostly landing well. The quips about empirical evidence and famous flat earthers are teasing without being derogatory, but these also help to ask bigger questions about how we treat those like these characters, believers of ideas that ostracise them.
While for many, flat earth theory is beyond the pale, The Flat Earthers is a brief, straight-line of a play that carries little message but remains a tidily put-together comedy with a decent amount of fun. It absolutely will not convince you that the Earth is not round, but it might spin your perceptions of such believers, stuck at the edge of the world, instead.
Runs until 20 December 2025
