Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Low Down
Strapped to a cannon, an Indian rebel answers to a British officer for the crimes of Kanpur, an Indian uprising against colonial forces.
Review
This powerful play shapes a complex historical event into an intense, rewarding experience. The subtitles introduce the piece, and say it all. In the year 1857 hundreds and thousands of Indians rose up against the British in rebellion…They failed. The ringleaders were strapped to cannons and blown to smithereens in front of crowds who were forced to watch. Often these events were made into shows, with live music and entertainment surrounding the executions. Now we are the audience, and we meet the Indian rebel, (writer and performer Niall Moorjani, in front of a cannon as he begins to tell us of his life growing up in Kanpur. But sitting in the audience is a British Officer, (Jonathan Oldfield), who doesn’t like the narrative, interrupts it, imposes his own questions on the rebel, rewriting history. He also has meta theatre knowledge, knows what the audience want to hear, insists on the inclusion of music, “Just like in pantomimes.”
It is beautifully performed by both actors and the tabla player, Sodhi, who supports the story, is silent when necessary, and punches the script with exclamation marks. Moorjani has a powerful dignity, the strength is in his stillness, but his fear showing through. (When he swaps places with the Officer and sits in the audience, his body remains shaking.) He quietly insists on HIS history, but often the script is punctuated with wry humour, and the Officer also picks up on this. Oldfield is superb at capturing the Officer’s arrogance, but he does offer to save the rebel’s life if he gives up the hiding place of the chief ringleaders. At every moment when you may think he has understood the situation, his casual racism and not so casual misogyny throws him back into the role of Oppressor.
There are beautiful complexities in the story. Hussani, a historical figure, is the enactor of the murder of British prisoners, and remembered as a lowly sex worker, which gave the British much to deride her for, but she would have been revered differently at the time. She is also imagined as a Hijra, India’s third gendered community occupying much of the same space as non-binary and trans people do today. Witnessing the horrific events in Gaza, the play is a terrible reminder of history repeating itself, that minorities still fight for equality.
The outstanding aspect of this play is that, despite a tremendous amount of research, the play never feels preachy, never feels that it is delivering exposition on every page. The Rebel and the Officer are beautifully human, feeling like authentic people from their time period. By breaking the fourth wall, we are made to feel implicit in the history, and it’s a play that has stayed with me since. One of the best plays on the Fringe, do try and catch it.
