Writer: Daisy Hall
Director: Jessica Lazar
A finalist in the 2023 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, Bellringers is a brilliantly imaginative debut by Daisy Hall, first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and now showing at Hampstead Downstairs. Lighting (David Doyle) and sound (Holly Khan) are both thrilling, and the whole is directed at perfect pace by Jessica Lazar.
Two young men in monkish robes, Clem and Aspinall, enter the bell tower of a church. They’re both soaking wet from the storm that rages outside. But what century are we in? Clem and Aspinall’s belief in the power of bellringing to disperse storms suggests it’s centuries away from the modern world. But then Clem pulls out a cigarette lighter, trying to light a soggy cigarette, one of the play’s teasingly playful moves.
The bell ropes dangling beside the young men seem just a nice bit of set-dressing on Natalie Johnson’s simple but evocative set. But soon, they acquire eerie significance. It seems that far and wide throughout the parishes of the Cotswolds – and no one has ever ventured beyond its borders – something apocalyptic is happening. Well water at Long Compton has turned red. A flotilla of thirty-four toads has been seen on the River Evenlode, riding lily pads towards Moreton-in-Marsh. Such is the power of belief in the malevolence of thunderstorms, rotas of bellringers are at the ready. But there have evidently been an increasing number of fatalities – bellringers ‘frazzled’, in their cheerful euphemism, during lightning strikes.
What keeps Bellringers firmly in the world of delight rather than horror is the combination of surreal comedy and something undeniably touching between the two young men, given pitch-perfect performances by Paul Adeyefa and Luke Rollason. Adeyefa, as Aspinall, is lovable straight man to Rollason’s Clem. Rollason’s performance is simply mesmeric. You can’t take your eyes off him, whether he is stock-still or off on a whimsical riff about Noah (‘When you see the ark taking shape in the dry docks, then we’ll talk’) or explaining his exceptionally wide peripheral vision.
Beyond the crackpot theories – locals are forever spotting likenesses of Christ in apple cores or pigs’ spleens – there are mysterious mushrooms which keep springing up between the flagstones. Can they be ghosts, the men wonder?
Lazar directs with an immaculate sense of timing, fully exploiting Hall’s suggestive pauses and silences. Structured round the increasing proximity of the storm, the mood intensifies. But rather than darkness, we see glimpses of the relationship between Clem and Aspinall. And fresh comedy keeps everything alight. Roscoe, a rival bellringer, has developed a theory – ‘He’s combining theology, meteorology and musicology into a new kind of science’ – a peal of five bells that is going to crack the problem. But there’s a shortage of bellringers due to continuous frazzlement. Nonetheless, the moment when we hear a distant peal of bells is truly hair-raising.
It’s all fabulously absurd, like a newly minted Waiting for Godot. You’ll hold your breath as the impossible-to-predict ending approaches.
Bellringers is a joy from start to finish and marks Daisy Hall as a truly remarkable playwright.
Runs until 2 November 2024
Pure delight
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