Fish are falling from the sky. The birds are swarming in the wrong direction. The moon rose three times yesterday. And a violent storm is raging outside. The gap between the lighting and the thunder is shrinking. Clem and Aspinall are bellringers in a vertiginous church steeple. Neighbouring bellringers are testing a new theory that a peel of bells will dispel the storm. Should they put this theory to the test?

Daisy Hall‘s debut play, Bellringers, explores how you keep faith when we’re running out of time to tackle the many, varied and mostly horrific consequences of climate change. This church is located somewhere in middle England amongst barren fields, broken gravestones and rivers that are bursting their banks as the rain continues to fall. Our bellringers feel like they’ve always been there but they’re painfully aware that their remaining time may be short as freak accident after freak, weather-related accident, continue to carry off the people they’ve grown up with.

Carefully staged (Jessica Lazar) in Paines Plough’s Roundabout theatre, light, sound and spooky mushrooms convey the crisis creeping up on the men as they search for their salvation. The script flip-flops between banter, humour and moments with a mythical, timeless quality. We’re clearly not quite located now but we might be. Clement (Luke Rollason) is stoically agnostic amidst the pending catastrophe where Aspinall (Paul Adeyefa) flounders to find some sort of divine intervention.

Committed and energetic performances aren’t quite enough to convince you that this story matters. Clearly, climate change is the greatest existential threat currently facing mankind. Young men in an ancient church relying on faith and folklore to fix this feel hopelessly wide of the mark – but maybe that’s the point.

Bellringers is at Summerhall – Roundabout until Mon 26 Aug 2024 at 13:15