Manipulate Festival reviews: When Prophecy Fails | Snapshots & more

Snapshots, The Studio, Edinburgh (Works in progress)

From ‘La Fantasmagorie’ to the Future, French Institute, Edinburgh ★★★★

In their latest piece of brilliant physical and visual theatre, the young Scottish company Groupwork pursue the same vein of inspiration that gave us their multi-award-winning 2019 show The Afflicted, later reworked as The Hope River Girls.

Their subject in The Afflicted was a moment of hysteria in the apparently peaceful landscape of white suburban America, involving a group of girls in upstate New York; and this time, in When Prophecy Fails, they plunge back to the 1950s, and a well-known sociological study of a small Illinois religious sect which became absolutely convinced the world would end on 21 December 1954.

The show, in other words, could hardly be more timely, as a reflection on what we now call “confirmation bias”, and the absolute impossibility of countering such fervent beliefs with mere facts. In a brief and near-perfect 65 minutes, Groupwork’s five-strong performing company, directed by Finn den Hertog (direction and dramaturgy) and Vicki Manderson (direction and choreography), tease out the essence of the story through their own brand of utterly gripping total theatre.

So there is powerfully inventive movement, spare but telling voice-over narrative, brilliantly chosen music and some astonishing stage and video design, in which the claustrophobic domestic environment of the house where the sect is based – all postwar standard lamps and thick curtains, designed by Milla Clarke – is interrupted by a huge screen showing Lewis den Hertog’s astonishing black-and-white visuals of the factual and psychological background to the story, from blanked-out images of the people involved, to haunting repetitive nightmares of 1950’s nuclear bomb tests. And always, at the centre of the show, there is the flawless ensemble performance of actor-dancers Grace Gibson, Amy Kennedy, Hope Kennedy, Samuel Pashby and Dylan Read.

The conclusion seems to be that people wholly committed to a belief system will always find ways of sustaining it, regardless of events and facts; but that failure to get to grips with reality will eventually lead to disintegration. That, though, was back then, long before the internet made it easy for people to live almost full-time in whatever online bubble of blind faith and fake news they choose to inhabit.

When Prophecy Fails was one of the centrepieces of this year’s short and sweet Manipulate Festival, designed to cut costs by focusing entirely on live work made in Scotland, alongside the festival’s major strand of international animated film. The sheer vigour of the work on show, though, promises a bright future, now that funding for the next three years is relatively secure. Manipulate’s Snapshots evening of short works in progress was hugely enlivened by glimpses of Craig McCulloch’s Nightmare – about a small boy, his Dad and the monsters that haunt the wee lad’s imagination – and of Julia Taudevin’s Auntie Empire, a hugely grotesque but memorably brave and vivid solo interlude in which Taudevin plays an incomprehensibly posh tartan-clad remnant of British imperialist attitudes.

And for those following the festival’s always fascinating programme of animated film, events included a superb session at the Institut Francais d’Ecosse, tracing the history of animation in the French-speaking world, from the 1908 one-minute classic La Fantasmagorie, to Frank Mukunday’s 2019 film Machini, about the lethal mining of rare minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Florence Miailhe beautiful 15-minute 2024 epic Papillon, about the Algerian Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache, who survived imprisonment in Auschwitz.

As ever, there’s a feeling that more dialogue between the worlds of visual theatre and animated film would be no bad thing; but an evening like this stands alone, as a timely reminder of the sheer determination, ingenuity and artistry of the animated filmmakers of the past century, both in good times, and in bad.

Read more: Manipulate Festival reviews: The Law of Gravity | Cartography