REVIEW: Gameplay, Carmen Collective, EdFringe 2026 ★★★★★

In April 2024 Israel bombed an Iranian Embassy in Syria. I was living in Trujillo, Peru and talking with my grandmother about the prospect of a war. She dismissed my anxieties but indulged my escape plan. We’d go to the Andes, if we survived. Maybe the Jungle. Latin America seemed far away from it all. In 2025 Keir Starmer announced the UK was now on a ‘war footing’. In Feburary 2026 Donald Trump and Benjamin Nethanhyu launched strikes on Tehran. A bomb hit a school and 156 Iranians, 120 schoolchildren were killed there. I called my mother from Edinburgh and said a catastrophe was imminent. When I sent Sam Rees some questions a couple weeks ago, he made the point that in some places, right now, it has already happened. I’m still in Edinburgh.

Gameplay is an astonishing piece of theatre. It is a hallucinatory projection and reflection of annihilation in the future and the past. Collaborating with musician AJ Turner, Sam Rees speaks a monologue from a stand, reading from a script. The artists have decided to prioritise sound, language, thought over image, movement, sweat. This is not a decision which shows the magic of imagination; Rees and Turner’s work is strikingly material. What it does is drop one of the most strange pretenses we have about theatre – that it should always represent characters. This is a Victorian notion, and Rees and Turner’s alternative is accessible, democratic and genuinely thought-provoking.

Rees’s monologue, the focal point for much of the piece, has drops and crescendos. The music falls and swells with it, focusing and unfocusing as Rees demands. It is a sonically compelling hour, with Turner’s ambient soundscape rhyming with Mark Fisher’s writings on Burial whilst fundamentally being their own unique thing. Similarly, Rees draws from all corners of contemporary political writing and philosophy but doing so in such an individual manner it is unmistakably his. Sam tells us that AJ is the only person to understand how he feels, because they share a fundamental anxiety — it is one I resonate with. Lingering in the background of Gameplay is that anxiety humming. That any moment now this will all end, 300 million people will die in a nuclear attack, we’ll be in an apocalypse. The social fabric of our society has had the life sucked out of it by a late capitalism, the luxury of the West could implode any moment. 

Sam Rees take these anxieties and uses them to construct a historical thread. The langauge of this show is like a philosophy out loud, like a beat poem, like a stream-of-consciousness. In some ways it’s like Mark Jenkin’s David Bowie is Dead, in others it’s like Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. It is always smart, witty and real. The first image that sticks in my mind is Russian State TV playing Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to calm its population. Watching the TV is Russian submarine commander Vasili Arkhipov, who prevented the Cuban Missile Crisis years earlier. There is a cheeky section where Daily Mail critic Quentin Letts goes to watch a show. We are always projecting in this show, we are often pulled back to earth. Rees’s moments are necessary and compelling, all images with the density of history behind them. These images, the threads they contribute to, the rhymes they create, are best witnessed at the show. But know they provoke.  

The spoken images are often contrasted against the strange, slightly embarrassing act we call theatre. This is an act in which Rees and Turner are innovating themselves in. I spend much of my life thinking about this act, and I have spent much of it feeling like it is futile. The problem with political theatre is how small it is. Rees and Turner are so aware of its limitations that they shock it with electric essentiality. What we watch in Gameplay is the essence of an act, the implication of an act. It smashes apart illusions and shows us the raw truth of what this strange art is. It is accomplished. It’s probably a tricky-second-album. But we all know those are the best ones. A strange, beautiful, real work. Raw, sad, sublime.

Recommended Drink: Something zillenial. Infused Gin and Tonic. Don’t pick a drink you recognise. 

You can (and really should) catch Gameplay at the Pleasance Dome (10 Dome) from 5-31 (not 17) at 14:40 (60 mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.