When Prophecy Fails review – gripping dive into a doomsday cult

In the early 1950s in the American midwest, a woman known by the alias of Marian Keech awoke in the night with the urge to write. But the words that came out weren’t her own: it was the voice of her late father, she was sure. Other voices from the beyond began to use Marian as a conduit, ultimately Jesus Christ himself, which is how Keech came to be at the centre of a doomsday cult of seemingly ordinary citizens convinced the world was about to end, but that they would be rescued by aliens from the planet Clarion.

Quietly on alert … Amy Kennedy as Marian Keech in When Prophecy Fails. Photograph: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

It is such a good story, one that was captured in a landmark social psychology study at the time as well as the book When Prophecy Fails, that you could argue Scottish theatre company Groupwork don’t have a lot to do. But their treatment of the tale is deceptively simple in a very well-crafted show that does no more and no less than it needs to.

Much of the narrative plays out in voiceover, in reports from the academics embedded in the group and quotes from the believers, leaving the performers free to embellish not with text, but with texture. Lewis den Hertog’s gently suspenseful score sets up a hypnotic mood and his video projections have a touch of Adam Curtis. Co-director Vicki Manderson is a choreographer who paints the characters’ physical world with precision, specific motifs and subtle storytelling. Playing Keech, Amy Kennedy has a particular physical presence, held a little tighter than the others, quietly on alert, tuned in to something no one else can hear.

Within that, there’s lots of open space to feel around for what might have been going on with this group, the Seekers, former churchgoers looking for a stronger spiritual hit. More than anything they are looking for answers, for someone to tell them what to do, what it’s all for. (And then there’s the woman who admits the floods just have to come since she’s spent all her money in a pre-apocalypse splurge.) The show muses on the futility of challenging such vehemently held beliefs, which when faced with real-world evidence only double down (a familiar feeling in the social media age). This is a satisfying piece of theatre that conjures a world both eerie and absolutely ordinary, with curiosity and sympathy for these suburban souls awaiting the Rapture.