Theatre for the End of the World
An entire production unfolds in the space between two breaths. One actor and one sound technician/musician take to the stage of a blank theatre. The lights are low. Swan Lake plays over the speakers. There is no elaborate set, no spectacle and almost nothing for the eye to grasp. For the next hour, you occupy the space between two breaths: suspended, listening, imagining.
One of the few genuinely audio-described-by-nature-of-the-performance shows at the festival, Gameplay contains very little in the way of conventional action. Instead, the important visuals are supplied by the audience’s imagination, conjured through the elaborate and evocative world created by a solitary voice. The performer does not promise enjoyment, entertainment or easy answers. There are no tricks, no theatrical sleight of hand and no show-business magic. What is offered instead is something far more elemental: the power of sound, language and the theatre of collective belief.
Everything in this production feels fleeting and intensely evocative. We move through two interconnected stories, bound together by the monumental choices of people who once held history at the edge of a knife, but whose lives and identities have now been largely lost to time. Their decisions remain, even when the people who made them have disappeared from collective memory. The result is a meditation on how fragile existence can be, and how much of what we inherit from history rests on moments that were once lived by ordinary, fallible human beings.
There is something profoundly moving about experiencing this in the present. The Fringe, at its best, has always had the ability to make the improbable feel immediate, and Gameplay achieves this by stripping theatre back to its most fundamental components: a voice, a listener, a shared space and the willingness to believe. In doing so, it celebrates the sacredness of the present moment at a time when so much of history seems to have conspired against the continuation of human existence.
This is not an easy or conventionally entertaining hour, nor is it trying to be. It is dramatic, raw, strange and heavy in equal measure. If you want challenging, unconventional theatre, Gameplay is a piece to lean into rather than resist. Come prepared to imagine, to listen and to wonder at the improbability of now. You may leave without being able to explain exactly what happened, but hours—or even days—later, you may still remember how it made you feel. And perhaps, for a piece so concerned with what survives, that is the most important thing it can leave behind.
Show Listing: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/gameplay
LISTINGS INFORMATION:
Venue: Pleasance Dome – 10 Dome
Dates: Aug 5th -31th (exl. 17th)
Time: 14:40 (60 mins)
Ticket prices: £14.50 / Concessions £13.50
Fringe box office: 0131 226 0000 / www.edfringe.com
Suitable for 12+