Creator: Burning Ladder Theatre Company
Four dancers in autumnal colours whirl and tumble around the stage: leaves in the wind. A toddler falls over, grazes his knee and cries for his mum to kiss it better. An old man falls from a stepladder and, looking up, he sees the stars are leaving. Or is the earth falling into nothingness? Burning Ladder Theatre Company is a globe-spanning, socially committed group of four performers, all recently graduated from RADA’s MA in Theatre Lab, who fuse physicality, movement, speech, clowning and devised theatre. Their intriguing inaugural show is full of charm, exploration and promise.
The show’s central imagery is strikingly reminiscent of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1902 poem Autumn, which starts: “The leaves are falling” and later continues (roughly): “And in the nights the heavy Earth falls too/From all the stars down into loneliness.” Burning Ladder’s Scenes from a Falling World has something of Rilke’s elegiac sense of mortality. The idea of falling in this show encompasses everything from pratfalls and dropped signs to loss of innocence, death, and global catastrophe. In various scenes, a football-sized globe is lifted, held, spun, lit up, anthropomorphised, and dropped.
There is a desperate poignancy in the sense of global jeopardy. And yet the show never takes itself too seriously. Its potentially weighty themes are lightened by comedy. The ubiquitous stepladder, which is almost the only item of stage furniture, becomes a car with two parents quizzing their daughter about why she’s unhappy (“You’re pregnant? It’s your grades … Is it your friends? Have you fallen out with your friends? Is it a boy? … Do I know his mother?”)
Scenes from a Falling World is a genre-defying ensemble piece. All four performers are skilled and versatile. The sketchy narrative aspect involves achronological scenes of family life. Tara Kitson affectingly plays Esther, mother of Leo (playful Jonah Buksbaum), while Emma Yvette Conlon is a convincing grandmother, movingly mourning her fallen husband. Buksbaum doubles as a professor who analyses the effects of falling on the autonomic nervous system and other fall-related concepts. Will Choy Edelson is the grandfather and, in a sparkling vest, Leo’s father Atlas. The Titan tasked in Greek Mythology with holding up the sky here holds the earth and drops the ball/globe as he falls in love (another meaning of “fall”) with a woman. Having got her pregnant (news which is emotionally conveyed in a few wordless seconds), he then leaves again to save a world in freefall.
Joe McInally’s sound and lighting help the show’s fluid and quickfire shifts between mundane domestic scenes (car journeys, leaf-blowers) and cosmic wonder. The ambient sounds are particularly effective. In the Arches Lane Theatre, rainfall and wildfires compete with the rumble of trains overhead, adding an apocalyptic rumble.
Playfulness is a keynote of Scenes from a Falling World. The performers are not afraid to laugh and be laughable, which makes their more serious moments even more powerful. This is a compelling show from an accomplished and adventurous new troupe.
Reviewed on 16 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
