Emma Howlett is a gifted, extremely clever writer-director who scored a deserved Summerhall hit last year with the audacious feminist science odyssey Aether.
Howett’s follow-up is The Plot and really (if you’re British, anyway) there is only one plot: the failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, aka the Gunpowder Plot.
A two-hander performed by Sophie Kean and Abby McCann, we initially meet brother plotters Thomas and Robert Wintour (aka Guy Fawkes’ less famous mates) as they’re playing a word association game in which they pass a lit match back and forth, with the loser the one holding it when it burns down.
It becomes apparent from their conversation that they’re dead, and awaiting entry to ‘upstairs’ or ‘downstairs’ although I think Howlett means this as much reputationally as theologically. The fact they’re playing with matches, which didn’t really exist until at least two centuries after their deaths, suggests they’ve been here a long time and that perhaps they’re only going to go up or down when public opinion on the Plot settles.
The plot of The Plot is very heavy going indeed
To that end they don a series of costumes and take on a succession of characters ranging from themselves and their fellow plotters to James I and even William Shakespeare to offer a guide to the tangled threads of the Plot, from its nuts and bolts origins, class and religious dimensions, to the full gruesomeness of Fawkes’ execution, to the way Macbeth was inspired by the event.
It’s fascinating in the way reading a weighty history book is fascinating - I felt appreciative of everything Howlett’s play was telling me. But despite fine, emotional, sometimes funny performances from Kean and McGann, the whole thing is dense as molasses, with almost a breathtaking lack of interest in helping the audience through its web of ideas and information. Respect to Howlett, but one wonders if an outside director might have picked a better path through this tangle than the writer. Yes, The Plot is at its best smart, thought-provoking stuff, but the plot of The Plot is very heavy going indeed.
