In the 1950s in the American Midwest, an ordinary suburbanite named Marian Keech believes she’s receiving signals from beings who dwell on another world. The war between Jesus Christ and Lucifer has already resulted in the destruction of their world, they tell her, and now it’s coming to Earth to do the same.
Somehow she convinces a group of local fellow travellers – everyone from working class neighbours to university students – that what she sees is real, and they form a small but growing group who regularly meet at her house. Their beliefs tap into a blend of religious fundamentalism, the UFO craze of the day and a timeless need to belong, drawing the media’s crowingly sceptical attention.
Scottish company groupwork made their debut at the Fringe in 2019 with The Afflicted, an odd but compelling piece of multi-media physical theatre about a similar, unsolved case of mass psychosis in New York state. When Prophecy Fails (co-written by brothers Finn and Lewis den Hertog and directed by Finn and Vicki Manderson) builds on this aesthetic by placing five performers in a suburban 1950s household and telling their story physically, to a backdrop of dissociated radio noise and excerpted pre-recorded accounts of this weird doomsday cult.
Writhing and falling through Keech’s tempestuous ‘visions’, slowing down for a bizarre and amusing scene of domestic normality and engaging in a frantic dance to stop members exiting the stage, Manderson’s choreography is captivating and thoroughly hypnotic. It feels much like being in a cult must.
When Prophecy Fails, Studio Theatre, run ended