Co-led by director Finn den Hertog, choreographer Vicki Manderson, and video and sound designer Lewis den Hertog, Groupwork is a Scottish theatre company beloved by Scottish audiences since their earlier works The Afflicted (2019) and The Hope River Girls (2022). When Prophecy Fails, their first new work in four years, comes to Edinburgh International Festival this August. Inspired by the landmark social psychology study of the same name into the concept of cognitive dissonance, the show reimagines the events surrounding what is often described as history’s first UFO doomsday cult, a group awaiting apocalypse and salvation by beings unknown. Ahead of its EIF premiere, we sat down with Finn, Vicki, and Lewis to discuss the origins of the show, its connection to this year’s festival theme, and their vision for Groupwork as a company.
It started on a walk
The project first came to Lewis during the Covid pandemic, prompted by a phrase he kept hearing in relation to Brexit and the political turmoil in the United States. As Finn recalls it:
“We all spend a lot of time together anyway, and we were out for a walk during lockdown and he said this feels like it might be the next Groupwork project. It smells of Groupwork. It’s about an interesting and unusual set of circumstances, an unusual group of people. And there is a kind of quality to it that lends itself to, there’s a quality of the uncanny to it as well. It’s a social psychological study, but it deals with people who have beliefs out of the norm.”
Once the collective had familiarised themselves with the study behind the book, the process of building the show began in the rehearsal room rather than on the page. “We just get into the room with an idea and then start playing around with it,” Finn explains. “We start playing with what sounds this makes us think of, what music, what films, what movement. Even though Lewis had written a text and there is text in the piece, it’s not like we start with a script and go from there, we just kind of get into the room and start playing with ideas, and from there work out if it is indeed a show that we want to make. It felt very, very quickly we realised that there was something in this that spoke to us all as makers.”
On the side of the believers
Because When Prophecy Fails deals with real, ordinary people, the company was conscious from the outset of how to treat that history responsibly. Lewis explains where their sympathies lay:
“From day one, we agreed that the central characters in the story do have this belief that separates them from their larger community or society, makes them outcasts and figures of ridicule in some cases, and that they were the people whose side we were on. And that actually meant trying to get people to want the world to end all the way back then in 1954. So it’s quite a difficult thing to try and ask of your audience, but it’s about empathising with these people, even though their beliefs are unusual, and noticing that they actually, as a group themselves, were very caring towards one another. It was a very non-destructive, non-coercive, non-exploitative type of cult. We wanted to highlight that these were vulnerable, gentle, suburban Christians who didn’t hurt anyone in what they were doing, and yet they received this kind of hostility. The ultimate kind of care is: we are with you on that, believers.”
Finn adds that the show also has to reckon with the limitations of the original 1956 study itself, which shaped the very events it claimed only to observe. “Because the study was, in a sense, coercive, and they infiltrated this group and therefore affected the results of the study to an extent, our piece also deconstructs the ethically and morally ambiguous practice of the original study, or shines a light onto that as well.”
Cutting and arranging
One notable change for this production is that Lewis, who designed video and sound on the company’s previous shows, has also taken on writing the text. He describes how that background shaped his approach:
“The original text has got so much of the detail that’s required. There’s only a few moments where it’s mainly invention, a lot of it is like cutting and arranging, which is similar to video editing or sound editing. There’s a wealth of material already. It’s about finding the efficient through line. So in a way, it’s like film editing: what’s the information that’s required, and what’s the quickest way to get through there?”
An American story, told from Scotland
Groupwork have now made three shows drawn from American history despite being a Scottish company, and the three spoke about how their work relates to the present moment without naming it directly. “We try not to be too on the nose with that kind of thing, because it’s interesting to also think about our work as still being relevant,” Lewis says. “We don’t know if anyone’s going to be thinking about or re-staging our work in the future, but it’s interesting to imagine making work that would still have some relevance in the future. I think that’s why stories from bygone eras are all the more interesting when they’ve got resonance with today. This particular piece, cognitive dissonance was in the conversation a lot back in 2016, when I was first becoming aware of it, in response to Brexit and Trump. It’s interesting making work that responds to the moment, but it doesn’t feel like necessarily what’s happening in the moment. I think it’s good to draw awareness and let people’s imaginations make that connection themselves, rather than telling people about it.”
Finn approaches the same question from another angle. “I think it speaks to the spirit of the times, but it also speaks to the spirit of the depths. It’s also about things that are beyond this present time. It’s about grief and trauma and a need for connection and about loneliness and about community. It’s about all of those things that we come back to time and time again, and we live in this very disconnected moment, and that’s being exploited. I think we all approach art from the point of view of: we make the thing that is interesting to us in the moment, we make the art that speaks to us in the moment, and when it meets an audience, it resonates with an audience in their moment, and in the moment that we’re living through. I don’t think we make shows that are about the moment we are living through, but they end up resonating with the moment we are living through. And that feels exciting to us, because I think that they go some way to interpret the moment that we’re living through, because they can’t help but do that.”
As for the choice of American subject matter specifically, Lewis sees it as inevitable given the reach of American culture. “It’s the cultural hegemon. There are so many things that we’ve grown up with and been influenced by, from the TV shows and movies that we watch to the toys that we played with and the video games we played and music we listened to. America’s got this enormous kind of unmatched influence in our creative development as well. And so it feels as though when you’ve got a cultural superpower like that, even if you’re not the immediate subject of that superpower, you are a subject of it, and you’re thus also allowed to mine it for stories and insights. I also think any entity which is not only a cultural but also a military and economic superpower is fair game for anyone to criticise.”
Finn connects that directly to this year’s EIF theme. “The theme of the festival is All Rise. The EIF have obviously seen the way that American culture is interpreted in our work and decided that it fits within that theme. It’s about the deconstruction of the piece, set in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and in the immediate early days of the Cold War. It’s a time of extreme paranoia, of trauma, of the beginning of the American century, the rise of that cultural, and Lewis mentioned, military and economic superpower. Obviously now we are living in the fallout, and the sort of kicking and screaming decline. That’s fascinating, the point at which our story is set and the themes it deals with is societal, cultural, global trauma that was erupting there. It is a really interesting lens through which to view American culture. If we’re looking at American culture as a 250-year project up to this point, our specific point in time that we’re looking at is certainly an interesting moment.”
Dreaming it together
Asked about how they collaborate as a young company, all three point to shared instincts rather than a fixed process. “We do have quite similar aesthetic things that please us,” Vicki says. “It’s quite often that we’ll like the same piece of theatre that we’ve seen together, there’s a piece of theatre we saw at EIF last year that we were all blown away by. Because we share that, it never feels like, sometimes there are things that maybe we don’t necessarily all three of us agree on, but normally we find a middle point. We’re still kind of building what that is as a group as well, because this is only our third show, so we’re still learning.”
Finn frames it as a founding principle of the company. “Part of what Groupwork is, is about a non-hierarchical approach to making. Part of why we came together was because we recognised that there was something that we all were striving towards in our work, or, as Vicki said, recognising in other work that was exciting to us. So it’s not always plain sailing, there’s definitely points where we disagree about stuff, but that healthy disagreement is also part of this work. And there are also other people within that as well: our other collaborators, the performers, the lighting and set and costume design, Mila and Benny, our regular performer collaborators, our producer Sarah, all of their input is what makes it what it is. It’s not auteurship, it’s whatever the word is for collective auteur, well, yeah, it’s collective auteurship in a way, because it feels… Lewis said a great phrase when we were making this show, when we first put it on stage: he said it felt like we had all been dreaming this together for a long time. And that really is how it feels when a work ends up on stage that we’ve dreamt collectively.”
Arriving, and coming home
When talking about the meaning of bringing their work to EIF and later touring around Scotland, Vicki feels that “it feels very exciting that we’re able to share our work with an international audience. It’s an amazing thing to be in Edinburgh anyway, whether you’re doing the Fringe or EIF, because of the volume of people that are able to see your work. That doesn’t always happen in Scotland, so it’s really exciting that we get to share it. We just feel good about it.”
Finn also emphasises the meaning of the EIF stage and sharing it with other international companies: “We want Groupwork to be on a platform similar to those companies like FC Bergman, who were there last year with Works and Days, the European collective-making companies we feel we share DNA with. So it’s heartening to see that the programmers view us in that way as well. They’re putting us on a world stage alongside those European companies, and it’s great that we’re Scottish as well, that we’re representing Scotland.”
For Lewis, it comes down to something simpler: “It feels like a vote of confidence in the work and in the company. There’s something very special about the feeling of getting to represent our country, our Scottish theatre, and being picked as a good example of Scottish theatre. We’re all very proud of that.”
Bringing the show back around Scotland carries its own weight for Finn. “There’s a homecoming in a sense,” he says. “Our work is going to Dundee, where Lewis and I were raised. It’s coming back to Glasgow early next year.” He continues: “There’s obviously a huge influx of international audiences coming to Edinburgh during that time, so it’s great to then take it out around Scotland. We honestly believe there’s a real appetite for this kind of work. What I was saying earlier about our work sharing a certain DNA with European companies, there’s also Scottish companies that we feel share our values and our approach to work: Vanishing Point, and sadly no longer funded, Untitled, Stewart Laing’s company. They were big influences on us. So the work does have its place within the Scottish sector, and we really hope that audiences after the festival will come and see us around Scotland, from Aberdeen to Paisley.”
Image: Mihaela Bodlovic
