The End of the World

Flesh and Blood and Fish and Foul 

Belt Up's 'Odyssey' 

Ray Bradbury's '2116' 

The destruction of the world onstage, gradual or imminent, ought to be a terrifying prospect. It requires a sense of jeopardy: a feeling that the characters might through their own actions escape destruction, or else be chewed up by the forces of dystopia. Though extraordinarily surreal, Flesh and Blood and Fish and Foul manages just this.

Inside St Stephen's Church, Charlotte Ford and Geoff Sobelle have lovingly crafted civilisation's last office. Using the full depth and height of the interior, the set is not only fascinating but, in an oddly surreal way, a bit terrifying. Throughout the hour, the set comes alive with unexpected intruders who disrupt, and finally destroy, the final twisted vestiges of office life.

This decay is portrayed with hilarious absurdity by Ford and Sobelle. With well-choreographed physical humour, the pair grotesquely recreate or replace the drudgery of office routine – sticking up rows of Post-It notes, or preparing obtuse memos. Dialogue is kept to a minimum, and made of grossly exaggerated fragments of office politeness. And it needs to be exaggerated, for these are the performances of humanity which keep a lid on barely concealed animalistic drives—violence, sex, territoriality. Though perhaps a little slow in places, as Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl builds to its absurd and brilliantly overblown finale, it takes on the feel of a mad, wildly creative mini-epic.

Belt Up's 'Odyssey', by contrast, begins at full throttle and never lets up. A disorientating piece of participatory theatre, the audience enter through C Soco's charred innards to find a room with no seats and an unconscious body on the table. "Don't worry, I won't ask you to take part. I'll tell you," barks the superficially charming ringleader.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the play maps the torture of a poet—the Ulysses figure—trying to reach home, distraught at his involvement in the regime's propaganda war. What's interesting is that his own 'odyssey' is woven into the torture inflicted by the play's two other protagonists. In a clever affirmation of the power of Greek drama, the Homeric tale, with its series of grotesque characters and emotional trials, is used as a form of psychological torture. Kept in a state of lethargy by the lotus, here figured as a gas mask, the poet is the victim in a seemingly endless cycle of torture, performed for the pleasure of a succession of audiences who, through their involvement—here passing the gas mask, elsewhere becoming the six heads of Scylla—are disgracefully complicit in it.

It's not a complete success. The cast work hard to create a slightly jaunty, disaffected atmosphere for the performance, as if to suggest their own immunity to the violence. But it's an atmosphere that saps some of the harrowing potential from the torture. It's also a little too surreal at times, requiring more than a working knowledge of Homer to make much sense. Still, with this innovative, adventurous re-imagining of the Odyssey, Belt Up bolster their position as one of the most exciting young theatre companies at the Fringe.

Where these two productions succeed, Ray Bradbury's '2116' comes up monumentally short. Sure, there are some nice ideas in this otherwise confused musical: a wooden box from which all of the characters appear serves as a suitable bookend for this trinket-size production. The costumes and sets cut an appropriate contrast between the shiny, mechanised dystopia of 2116, and the punky, ramshackle feel of the rebel thespians.

But nice ideas, and an energetic, if earnest, cast can't save this fatally flawed production. Half futuristic morality play and half character-by-character introduction to the troupe of travelling players, its two acts don't really hold together, the second seemingly tacked on to shoehorn in Bradbury's dystopian bugbears. As a result, there's little empathy to be found for these characters; no fear of any potential for their demise in an authoritarian world which sees them as enemies. And then there's the music – the less said about which, the better. An hour and a half of heavily reverbed piano and MIDI flute sounds serves only to bathe the woefully simplistic lyrics ("What shall we do? What a stew!") which accompany them in a comparatively positive light.