The Washing Line – Chickenshed, London

Devisers and creators: Michael Bossisse, Dave Carey and Bethany Hamlin

This powerful and disturbing show tells the horrifying story of the mass suicide of over 900 people in a 1970s religious cult, based in Guyana. And as cast members agree, talking over real-life footage at the end, it is extraordinary to be able to take events as grim as these and create art from them – but Michael Bossisse, Dave Carey and Bethany Hamlin and their huge, richly inclusive, young cast carry it off with thoughtful professionalism and enormous energy.

The Rayne Theatre, configured with a huge traverse playing area for this production, is strewn with dozens of dead bodies as the audience finds seats and music plays softly. Then the appalled first responders, handkerchiefs to their noses, arrive in temperatures of over 80 degrees F. Flies buzz on the soundtrack. Thereafter, with the aid of large screens the story is unfolded in a series of clear flashbacks and flashforwards as we gradually learn how the Jonestown cult began, the history of Rev Jimmy Jones, the members who spotted danger and fled, the assassination of US Congressman Leo Ryan who tried to investigate, and the response in the years since the events, now categorised as mass murder.

The main narrative medium is dance drama with compelling choreography (also by Bossisse and Hamlin) while MD Dave Carey provides evocative, pulsating music in late 1970s style. Cast members speak with their lithe bodies, engage in leaps and lifts and there’s one very beautiful sequence with a circus-style wheel.

And it’s all seamlessly hooked together with dialogue and song including a big choral number at the beginning of the second act. It is clearly heading towards mass death – bodies like washing on a line – from the moment the lights go down and yet this cast also conveys that there was peace, happiness and fulfilment at Jonestown which is why most of them stayed including young people, couples with families and mothers with new babies.

The cast is Chickenshed’s usual, gloriously diverse mix of young members (teenagers rather than children in this case) and adult staffers, most of whom have a long history with the organisation. Jonny Morton is charismatically sinister as Jimmy Jones and makes it perfectly plausible that so many people trust him unquestioningly. We also see him, in youth, killing a cat because it would be “happier dead than alive” and the number of women he keeps close as well as his wife (Sarah Driver – good) sets alarm bells ringing. Ashley Driver is strong as the detective in charge of the initial investigation and Alex Brennan is good as the commonsensible young man who wants to get out.

The Washing Line began life in 2017 as a Chickenshed Foundation Degree final year production entitled What’s Wrong With Jim? It was then developed into a full-blown show and staged in spring 2022. It has been adapted, deepened and expanded for this revival.

This is one of those rare shows at the end of which the audience is so shocked and moved that applause somehow seems trivial. There is no curtain call and it’s unusually quiet as people file out.

Runs until 5 April 2025