Roundabout @ Summerhall
Four stars
When a man steps on stage and starts talking to us, he conjures up a picture of an entire world in every day turmoil. What follows in Sam Ward’s latest excursion into the imagination under his YesYesNoNo banner is a devastating dissection of how the world can be turned upside down in an instant.
It begins with a dead body, on a normal street in a normal town populated by a cast of seemingly ordinary people. As Ward rewinds on the events leading up to this, he casts the audience as the townsfolk, whose lives are changed when a stranger arrives at a party.
While the inadvertently prescient allegories aren’t hard to spot, Ward is never obvious in his telling, commanding the stage with a quiet authority as he lures his audience into his conspiracy. A slow burning air of alluring ambiguity drives Ward’s play about community, disruption and fear of change, as the tragic consequences that follow all but destroys that community.
If one is reminded of Eugene Ionesco’s allegory of Nazi invasion in Rhinoceros, Ward is neither absurd or polemical in his own disruption of the audience’s world. Rather, as he plays god, he transforms his explorations of a fractured society into a mesmerising poetry that captivates and disturbs.
Roundabout @ Summerhall until 26th August, 10.30am
The List, August 2024
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