FringeReview Scotland 2025
Low Down
Set in a dystopian world dominated by surveillance and control, Arlington follows Isla, a young woman held inside a mysterious high rise facility, waiting for her number to be called. Telling stories of her dreams for the world outside, her only human interaction is with an anonymous man on the other side of the wall. Today there is a new listener. Their encounter sparks a fragile connection that defies the cold mechanisms of the world around them, and what starts as a seemingly small human interaction turns into something much more terrifying and sublime.
Review
At the heart of the chilling dystopian future of Arlington, a tentative love story blossoms, offering a glimmer of hope in a dark, dark world.
Enda Walsh’s genre-bending play, Arlington, was first performed at the Galway Festival in 2016, breaking boundaries between forms – drama, visual arts, dance, poetry, music, and video combine to defy categorisation. This is a play which leaves us with as many questions as answers.
In Walsh’s inimitable style, Arlington creates a hermetically sealed world which creates its own rules. Structurally, it is a three act play, divided into three discrete sections.
The first section opens with Isla alone in a sterile room furnished only by waiting room chairs, a ticket machine, and a digital countdown on the wall marking her number in the queue, a place where she is biding her time waiting for her number to be called. Then the lights go out, and someone can be heard stumbling around. When they go on again, we see a Young Man in charge of her surveillance at a bank of screens between us and the stage. A conversation ensues between Isla and the Young Man, with her telling him tales of an imagined world beyond her incarceration. Gradually, a bond grows between them, until her number comes up and, disrupted by power outages, finally the lights go out to chilling impact.
In the second section, a man dances around the same space, part immersed in his own movement, part pushing at the edges. Imprisoned by outside agency, he creates imagined freedom which allows him both to live within the space and to test its boundaries. It is danced to a magnificently immersive, menacing soundscape from sound designer Garry Boyle and composer Cat Myers. The dance is angular and jagged, his body like a disjointed coat hanger fracturing the space time and again. The limits of the space are marked out with dynamic lighting from Emma Jones. A full thirty-minute dance piece, this is an exceptional performance from Jack Anderson.
The Young Man and Isla reunite in the third act. Initially, the Young Man, now bloodied and imprisoned, is alone in the space, manically trying on costumes and discarding them. Isla returns, having been freed by the Young Man and now with him in his final countdown. A beautifully lyrical duologue between the two of them, complemented by powerful video projection from Rob Willoughby, leaves us clearer about the narrative and meaning but still with questions hanging in the air that will continue to tease at our understanding beyond the performance.
Arlington reminds us that the worlds we create are constructed by our imaginations. The seeds of future dystopias are sown in our present, but they are not inevitable outcomes. The constant references to the Towers are redolent of the built environment we have created for ourselves and the hermetically sealed existences they create, relieved only by our power to create alternative visions and in the power of connection with others. While Arlington is dark and threatening, the characters bring their hope and defiance.
The play is fabulous with Walsh’s echoed cadences, in particular, the wonderful lyricism of the final discourse. The familiar and the strange maintain a mystery that keeps us intrigued and questioning throughout.
Aisha Goodman provides a strong and humane performance as Isla, while Alex Austin as the Young Man is touchingly naive and slightly gormless, a potent counterpoint to Isla. Jack Anderson’s dance performance is a wonderfully physical interpretation of how we create freedom within our own space and are confined by outside forces. The recorded voices of Andy Clark, Pauline Goldsmith, and Ann Louise Ross are used to powerful effect.
Co-directors, Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello, are also co-choreographers, a reminder of how integral dance and movement are to the piece. Their ingenuity and their command in bringing the elements together are impressive.
All in all, Glasgow-based dance-theatre company, Shotput, has produced an outstanding piece of theatre that is intriguing and challenging. It raises important questions about surveillance, control, and alienation at a time when raising our voices against the dying of the light feels increasingly urgent.
