Gunpowder, treason and a distinct lack of plot.
This October, Edinburgh has been abuzz with the exciting arrival of a world premiere! It’s not often we get to see a new show without a long train ride to London, and you could feel the excitement in the packed auditorium of Capital Theatres Festival Theatre this week.
Treason tells the tale of Guy Fawkes and the infamous gunpowder plot in the 1600s. Through an imaginative, if at times hard to follow, retelling we meet Thomas and Martha Percy and friends who have suffered years under the anti-Catholic laws and strife brought in by Henry XIII. With help from other members of their secret community, a plot is hatched to take down the new Scottish king James who has welched on his promises to protect the Catholics and abolish the taxes set on them. In theory, this should be an exciting show with some rich and complex themes but it fails to deliver enough of the history to make an impact.
Billed as a “folk-musical” I was excited to enjoy a musical with songs in a softer style than we are used to seeing from the West End and Broadway. However, after the first couple of numbers, the style seemed to slip and shift away from the opening whimsical whistle and fiddle motifs into much more pop-based modern musical theatre stylings with belts and riffs aplenty. Present throughout much of the show were beautiful religious motifs in the choral singing ensemble which created a very pleasant link to the religious topics throughout the dialogue.
The ensemble were on top form and delivered every piece of choreography, harmony and set movement with aplomb. What was hard to shake was the ever-present thought that everything felt a bit familiar. To agree with several other audience members around us, this felt like British Hamilton. Ensemble did a great job performing Taylor Walkers choreography but with the hip-hop/contemporary style paired with their costumes of neutral toned bloomers and doublets felt too much like a discount Hamilton for comfort.
Confusion abounds throughout, as we meet Guy Fawkes, who at first seems to be a part of the ensemble, only watching the other characters and occasionally narrating but this was rather hard to follow with the strange cadence of the dialogue which sits uncomfortably between rap and beat poetry. The first act focussed mostly on Thomas and Martha Percy but the book does not do a good job of explaining their motivations to push them toward such a drastic plan. Several songs between this pair feel irrelevant and more time could have been given to the other characters who don’t get any real focus until act two.
Act two is the much stronger piece, with some very good songs, a ramping up of tension and finally we get a bit more character development. Thomas (Sam Ferriday), Jack (Kyle Cox), Catesby (Connor Jones) Robin (Alfie Richards) and Timothy (Lewis Edgar) deliver a couple of haunting and musically interesting songs as they row up the misty Thames and dig their tunnels. This is what we came for and these five do not disappoint. Sadly, we lose a bit of momentum after a strong start to the act and we remain in the dark as to the role of Guy Fawkes in this. Overall, this show needs some work if they hope to make it a success. All of the actors did well with what they had to work with but the overwhelming feeling coming out of the theatre was confusion. Characters motivations were a mystery, relationships felt forced and not enough historical context is given to allow an average musical theatre audience to easily follow the story. There was a sense that the writers did not all agree on what they wanted to say with this show, and so failed to really say anything.