Review: PRECIPICE, New Diorama

What do we do when the world is falling apart around us? We sing.

Cloying though that sentiment may be, in the hands of the team of five devisers behind Precipice, it’s anything but. Our setting is a high-rise tower beside the Thames in Greenwich, and our singers are five post-apocalyptic survivors in the year 2425, commemorating the anniversary of the founding of their commune with acoustic guitars and a rudimentary DJ set.

The celebration has a darker side, though, as in a Hunger Games-style twist, a quaint tombola will elect one commune member to leave the tower, and expose themselves to the (supposedly) toxic fumes lurking on the outside. Four hundred years earlier, meanwhile, a young couple is moving into their first flat, only to find themselves on the edge of environmental disaster in which they’re partly implicated.

If this all seems elaborate to develop in two hours, it is. Precipice plays fast and loose with its two intersecting timelines, allowing the actors from both plotlines (some of whom play multiple characters) to interrupt each other’s dialogue, and the future to literally bleed into the present.

Compelling though this is, the side effect is that we don’t spend enough time on each fleeting vignette. Though its premise may be miles more interesting, in its rushed execution the futuristic commune storyline mostly rehashes the tropes of the zombie apocalypse genre, complete with gas masks and hastily rationed supplies.

In the present day, despite sensitive acting performances from Holly Freeman and Eric Stroud as the young couple, we again don’t spend enough time with them to really understand where their motivations come from. The characters are respectively a civil servant working on flood relief and a biomedical scientist, so they ought to bring compelling professional perspectives, but we’re lacking a well-rounded picture of their working lives beyond whispers of shadowy corporate dealings and frustrating Zoom calls.

Less important than the intricacies of the plot, however, is the overwhelming sense of dread evoked by these fleeting glimpses of life as catastrophe strikes. Precipice’s writers are less interested in disaster itself than in how we react to it.

Do we house a stranger in need, or hoard our resources to protect those closest to us? Is there any point trying to fight at all when losing is inevitable? One early song might presciently proclaim that “the world required changing and we didn’t want to change it”, but the rest of the show is much more sympathetic towards helplessness in the face of environmental destruction.

While some lyrical metaphors don’t quite land – there’s an entire song riffing on a game of Monopoly, for example – the music is the glue that holds this show together. In an era where musical theatre sounds ever more identikit, the score draws imaginatively on dance music, folk and arena rock, and uses a range of unconventional vocal techniques. It’s especially pleasing to see actors play instruments on stage, including guitars, cellos, keys and various synths and vocal distorters.

What the creators have constructed is less a musical theatre score than an entirely new folk tradition. "The End of the World is Nigh" writes a new history of the world from the Black Death to the future climate collapse, a narrative that inspires both hope of survival and cynicism in the apocalyptic commune. Elsewhere, striking imagery – the lone mudlarker patrolling the riverbank, the panoramic view of the Thames – crops up in song in 2025 and in 2425, a motif translated to and radically reinterpreted by the strange world inhabited by our descendants.

Here is innovative new musical theatre at its very best: the music is not an addendum to the story, but something that elevates, reinforces, even becomes the story itself. Precipice may not be a perfectly constructed story, but it’s near-perfect in how it uses music to tell that story.

Precipice plays at New Diorama until 13 December