Bellringers review – apocalypse in the belfry strikes strange note

The greatest dilemma of our age is also the hardest to write about. When the consequences of global heating seem so inescapable, what chance the dramatist of finding an ending? Not just a happy one – any ending at all.

Gamely, Daisy Hall has a go at it with this finalist from the 2023 Women’s prize for playwriting, produced by Atticist , Ellie Keel and Hampstead theatre. Its setting is the steeple of a church in rural Oxfordshire, where the names of the villages sound ancient, even mythic. It gives Bellringers the atmosphere of a timeless fairytale.

This is sheep country where only the fields separate one parish from the next. The two old friends in the belfry, Clement (Luke Rollason) and Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa), have grown up in this place and appear to know the entire population by name.

But the threat is less Brothers Grimm than the Book of Revelations. Dressed in cassocks, Clement and Aspinall are threatened by a biblical apocalypse: today it is a storm and the high chance of being “frazzled” by lightning. Fire, fungus and fish inundation are also on the cards – and on the increase.

The men’s only defences are prayer and superstition, and neither puts much faith in those. Their job is to ring the bells to somehow ameliorate the approaching storm; tradition dictates that the perfect peal will calm the weather. They are unconvinced it will work but have no better alternative.

Rollason and Adeyefa deliver the script with all the gusto they can, but the production, directed by Jessica Lazar, is uncertain in tone. The script is too light to generate gallows humour, but the air of jokey inconsequentiality is an awkward fit for impending doom. Nor is it clear what Hall is saying, whether about the nature of blind faith or climate catastrophe or some more whimsical idea.

• At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 26 August . Then at Hampstead theatre, London , 27 September–2 November.

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