In a fabulously metaphorical opening to The Plot, brothers Tom and Rob are playing chicken with matches. They’ve been condemned to death for contributing to the Gunpowder Plot and find themselves with a lot of time on their hands. For reasons that will become clear, they decide to recreate the events leading up to the eventual foiling of the plan to blow up the Houses of Parliament, kicking off a riotous procession of characters from King James I, to his courtiers, to complicit (or not) priests, to equivocating lords to wives, both real and fictional.
This is a super clever script from writer and director Emma Howlett. She overlays the real plot to kill the King with Shakespeare’s contemporaneous Macbeth script, played out by actors Hal and Richard. So the story reverberates with echos. Rob’s wife Gertrude attempts to talk him out of the conspiracy, moments after Lady Macbeth attempts to talk the eponymous character into it. Culpability is a continual drumbeat.
Tom and Rob play all the characters. Sophie Kean and Abby McCann play Tom and Rob. There’s something delicious (and suitably Shakespearean) in the cross-dressing with Gertrude a lone voice of (relatively) selfless sense. McCann’s foppish James is a particular treat. Simple, stunning staging from Ellie Wintour makes a heap of gunpowder (of course) a focal point, hidden under a twisting lattice of chains and keys worthy of the layers and intricacies of the script. Gorgeous costumes are period-perfect and perfectly versatile, transforming Tom and Rob from king to courtier to Catholic dissident in a twist and a knot and a heartbeat.
The only thing that’s tricky about this particular plot is the parallel stories, delivered at breakneck speed, by two actors playing so many characters that it’s hard to keep track. Maybe more could have been done to differentiate the characters and help the audience keep up. But maybe we aren’t meant to. Maybe the point is that power will win out and all we can do is scamper along for the ride.
The Plot is at Main Hall at Summerhall until Mon 31 Aug 2026