The Studio, Edinburgh
Five stars
The end of the world as we know it has been pretty much nigh for some time now. Yet despite a parallel universe load of conspiracy theories and threats of alien invasions, somehow it manages to keep on turning. But what does it take to believe in flying saucers and interplanetary interventions to a near messianic degree? More importantly, what happens when the apocalypse never comes and normal life resumes?
These were the sort of questions being asked back in the pre internet 1950s by social scientists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, who infiltrated one such group of believers that held court in an all American suburban living room. Calling themselves the Seekers, the group put faith in the idea that an impending biblical flood was about to devastate the earth.
The good news, however, is that they believed – that word again – they would be saved by extra-terrestrials who, like thieves in the night, would beam them up and take them to a better place. Spoiler alert. The inter-planetary saviours never showed up, and the Seekers were left out on the lawn in their underwear as the heavens passed them by.
This stranger than fiction saga is brought to eerie life by Scotland’s young, state-of-art Groupwork company, whose impressionistic fusion of dance, theatre and audio-visual cut-ups makes for a mesmerising seventy-minute trip. Beaming down over the weekend at this year’s slimmed down Manipulate festival of animated film, puppetry and visual theatre following a brief preview run at Platform in Easterhouse, this is inspired by the book that documented the original study, which gives the show its title.
Opening with the crackle of what may or may not be out there, the five performers who walk on to Milla Clarke’s period set might have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, so peachily unassuming do they appear in their vintage apparel.
Lewis den Hertog’s on screen collage of spacey imagery and recorded voices join the dots of the study, from the woman code-named Marian Keech’s seemingly possessed lurch into automatic writing, to the suspension of disbelief her new disciples buy into in the hope of salvation.
The obsessive everyday mundanity of the shared domestic bubble they shelter in creates its own insular eco-system where there is only one truth. It could be bible study or a book group, so ordinary does the gathering appear. Even the moments of transcendence that come through the shared experience of Vicki Manderson’s choreography in her and Finn den Hertog’s co-production are rooted in some kind of collective need.
After the world changing destruction of the Second World War and the array of pulp fiction sci-fi films and magazines that flourished in the 1950s with one paranoid eye on unknown Cold War futures, for those with stars in their eyes, these outer limits were as good to cling to for comfort as anything else.
Offset by the hauntological sights and sounds on screen and speakers, the near wordless interplay between performers Grace Gibson, Amy Kennedy, Hope Kennedy, Samuel Pashby and Dylan Read is more akin to a live installation than a play per se. This is heightened by the lesser-sung vintage pop records that punctuate each scene like lingering ghosts in the machine of some retro-future radio show. This fosters a woozy, melancholy air that reminds you just how slowly the world moved back then. These days, social media channels would be aglow with the latest second coming within seconds.
When Prophecy Fails captures the lengths some people will go to find something to put faith into, blind or otherwise, when there isn’t anything or anyone left to look up to here on planet Earth. If the truth really is out there, a beautiful cosmos may yet await in this hypnotic rendition of a twilight zone where cult fiction is born.
The Herald, February 17th 2025
ends
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