Flashing white dots on a screen like the interference you used to get on black-and-white TV, and a crackly old radio broadcasting more or less the same. What on earth were we in for? Well, whatever it was, it probably wasn’t entirely ‘on earth’. When Prophecy Fails is set in 1954, in an unidentified small-town America, and the world is about to end…
Groupwork is a small Scottish theatre company founded in 2019 by choreographer Vicki Manderson, director Finn den Hertog and Lewis den Hertog (writer, composer and video/sound man), although their collaborations suggest that those divisions are probably fairly fluid. Their theatre probes the nature of truth in a post-truth age and the extreme psychological states like mass hysteria, doomsday cults and conspiracy theories. No shortage of those today.
In the 1950s America was gripped by reports of UFOs, alien abduction and intergalactic contact. Sci-fi boomed, Orson Wells almost shut down the country with his radio version of The War of the Worlds. And in an unidentified small American town, suburban housewife Marian Keech came to realise she was the recipient of messages warning that the world would end on December 21st. Not to worry, however, because flying saucers would be coming to rescue the chosen and take them to a safe planet. The first voice she identified as that of her father but many others followed and eventually the voice of Jesus himself came through. This is a true story, documented in a book and by contemporary studies by academics who infiltrated the group. Clearly this was a gift for Groupwork.
A background screen showed newscast ‘evidence’ of flying saucers, alien abduction and other attempts at contact from the beyond. A jumble of voices quoted ‘facts’. Three versions of the folk-spiritual ‘When the stars begin to fall’ (‘My lord, what a morning!’, looking forward to judgement day) played at intervals. Onstage, gradually the neighbours were drawn in, first intrigued by the news then joyful with anticipation of the Rapture. Some tried to leave and were drawn back in, others were left still hopeful at the end, after the moment had come and gone. Or were they?
The essential ordinariness of it all – the period furniture, Marian’s conscientious housework, an afternoon tea party, the niceness of the neighbours – was quietly chilling, something underlined towards the end when ‘Over the Rainbow’ replaced the spiritual. There was actually very little dance here as opposed to stylised movement but on occasion they broke into ecstasy, reaching up to pull facts from the sky. But it didn’t matter.
We might not know what happened to Marian, but here in 2026 when tech has made conspiracy theories, mis/disinformation, fake news as real as newsprint, what price belief, and when that fails, what is left for us? What a thoughtful and provoking piece.
