When Prophecy Fails @ Studio Theatre
Groupwork Theatre’s Edinburgh International Festival offering finds the pulsating dissonance between the sublime and the banal
In the 1950s, Marian Keech began to receive apocalyptic messages from alien intelligences. Floods were coming to wash away the old world, and only the faithful would be saved. Keech shared her revelations widely and gathered around herself a small group of believers who waited for the prophesied day, for the end of things and their own salvation.
Groupwork Theatre’s When Prophecy Fails tells this story through an intriguing blend of music, dance and video. The sets are beautifully designed, and the soundtrack is simultaneously nostalgic and transcendent, evoking both the homespun past and an uncertain future. We witness a nascent community constructing ritual and meaning together through the wonderful and hypnotic choreography.
The action onstage is augmented by mesmeric filmed sequences that explore the persistent phenomenon of ships sighted in the skies throughout human history, while another powerfully evokes their morbid fascination with sin, sexuality, decay and destruction. These darker and mystical sides of the budding cult ultimately and inevitably take us to the day of revelation. When it does not materialise, we see the sublime and the spiritual choke before acquiescing into a mundane world without prophets, spaceships and apocalyptic floods, and where the chosen few are reduced to the status of a punchline.
If there is anything unbalanced about When Prophecy Fails, it is answered by its own title. What happened to Keech and her followers was both fascinating and deeply revealing about the human mind, so much so that their story has become a classic case study in cognitive dissonance and belief persistence. However, here the principal focus on the before instead of the after makes these powerfully illogical tendencies seem somehow less pernicious. Keech herself claimed to have saved the world through her actions and continued to receive and share her revelations for decades afterwards, until the day of her passing.
When Prophecy Fails, Studio Theatre, run ended.