FringeReview UK 2025

This Little Earth

Arcola Theatre, 3 hearts canvas and Izzy Carney

Genre: Contemporary, Dark Comedy, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Arcola Theatre, Studio 2

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

There’s a miraculous quote ending Antarctic survivor Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World: the volume at the heart of this play. About how some people will go to the ends of the earth for a penguin’s egg. And here be penguins. They’ve hatched in ways you won’t believe. And some play with the earth being flat like a pebble. Jessica Norman’s This Little Earth plays at Arcola’s Studio 2 till November 15, directed by Imy Wyatt Corner.

Norman’s won major playwriting awards, including being longlisted for the Women’s Prize and shortlisted for the Originals Playwriting Award. Here she returns (like Wyatt Corner) to the Arcola, where an embryonic version of This Little Earth was performed. Eminently worth developing, it’s a bit of a penguin’s egg too.

An accident (it’s complicated, we find) pitches Honey (Fanta Barrie, The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs) and Christopher (Ross O’Donnellan, Belfast) over a crevasse to land them 15 metres down. How they extricate themselves is dealt with in parallel to flashbacks that lead to this moment, as the couple’s plight plays out. Christopher interrupts the Cherry-Garrard-reading Honey at a Wetherspoon’s.  She’s just been to her elder sister Sadie’s funeral. Both are acutely vulnerable: fertile ground. An awkward chat-up and Christopher slowly reveals his big theme. Repelled at first, Honey returns. Conspiracy’s infectious. And it infected  – and perhaps killed – Sadie.

Norman’s far more interested in the effects of such theories, inflecting the mindset of how everything’s connected. How real cover-ups, about Iraq, church sexual abuse or (just possibly) the origins of Covid get spliced into a “lunar fake” world-view by conspiracists: or how someone believing a more plausible theory gets sucked in to where Flat Earthers claim, everything originates. In a world of post-truth (Norman wrote this during Covid) that’s only metastasized since, it’s seductive. One political caste drenches so much fake that its aim of dissolving truth has begun to work. A world of polarised deprivation leaves people hungry politically and spiritually too. Norman’s Christopher touches on these themes, one or two of which undoubtedly resonate. That’s the hook.

Barrie’s quick-witted, dominant Honey is thoroughly convincing as someone who, like Christopher, has been made complicit by past actions. Things are connected, but not in the way Honey sees; when she does, is it too late? Christopher too, shouty and panicky in the Antarctic where Honey’s literally cool, might have secrets, but he’s not always responsible for them.

Whist Barrie’s quick affection and lightning reactions to reveals set the narrative, she’s particularly good at suggesting Honey’s ultimate need. Both characters are now alone. They have only each other; with buried pasts and discoveries to share.

O’Donnellan’s warm but temperamental Christopher also proves tricksier than he means to be, perhaps. O’Donnellan brings him edgily to the rim of panic, as if Honey’s discoveries thrust him over a corner of his imagined world. In a literal sense, that’s where they are. The realist reveals of the plotline are superbly sprung.

The play’s convincingly handled to this point. It’s perhaps hard to swallow every flicker of a plot that lands the couple in Antarctica (they steal a Zodiac boat for the final leg), to discover the ends of the earth. Local details of conditions work for a little, but elements of the climax, always likely to prove hallucinatory, have been rewritten at least once, as the text shows.  An influencer, Nigel West and then a giant Penguin start spouting endorsements and refutations. The Penguin at least lays two variants of a story that concerns Honey deeply.

Arcola’s Studio 2 has always worked best stripped back. Sets can look like piled-up children’s hideaways. So I was truly impressed by Hugo Dodsworth’s light and projection which play magically on the diaphanous suspended blue shards that make up most of Cat Fuller’s set. Skyscrapers melt into permafrost. Irradiated with city sunlight and Antarctic’s glittering blue dark, it should be up for an award. Jamie Lu’s sound groans as if the whole iceberg is knocking at Studio 2. Hamza Ali’s movement too creates a snappy and tethered relationship between the couple, so when they break apart it’s a different world.

Cast and creatives are absolutely first-rate, including the courage of producers – the Arcola, 3 hearts canvas and Izzy Carney. Wyatt Corner has assembled a crack team that flesh out the impossible. Barrie and O’Donnellan radiate conviction, warmth, humour and despair.

Ten pages of an 83-page script very near the end is at once too packed with all sorts of driftwood, and too diffuse. Imaginatively it spoils the foregoing realism. It’s easy to be harsher about the climax, which is frankly a mess: but the very last moments of this 115-minute play at least suggest an epiphany that might work if the foregoing was cut. Norman has given flat-earthers enough rope to dangle themselves eternally over a crevasse. But with the liminal apparitions she piles on the mind-melt, and the Penguin’s useful pebbles are lost in it.

It’s as if Norman wants to bury all conspiracy theorists in a single play, and she has the support of most of us. But this isn’t the play for all seasons; it’s partly buried in its own blizzard. But there’s so much fine writing, superb characterisation (enough to conjure wonderful performances here) and a compelling story that you long for a rewrite. Norman is going to be a force. Watch out for her and see a powerful dramatic imagination at least hatch here.

Stage Manager Hannah Gillett, Production Manager Daniel Steward. Development Director Jess  Edwards.

Published November 5, 2025November 5, 2025 by Simon Jenner