Review: THREE BILLION LETTERS, Riverside Studios

We are delighted to report that real fringe theatre is back. The invigorating, daring, challenging, form-subverting kind of venture that makes the stage its playground. We haven’t encountered anything like this since before Covid. There isn’t a lot of theatre with specifically scientific research as its core, either. Commercially, The Effect (Lucy Prebble’s play about a clinical trial) had a revival in 2023 with Jamie Lloyd at the helm and Caryl Churchill’s evergreen reflection on human-cloning, A Number, was on just the year before (curiously, both starred Paapa Essiedu).

Looking away from the West End, it’s even harder to find something that sits firmly at the junction with science. Three Billion Letters swoops in at the rescue and begs you to think. Created by TAKDAJA, the piece is a heady mix of data and experimentalism. Does our DNA control more than our eye colour and predisposition to illness? How do we determine our identity? There’s so much gene-ius in it. 

Leave the thought of passive spectatorship at the door; this isn’t one of those shows. With a tiny slip of paper and an envelope, we become willing participants in their research. The action starts off with big symposium vibes, the vernacular of medical academia washing over the audience with no expectation of being understood. Said in the most positive way possible, TAKDAJA doesn’t care about the spectator. Performers Mimmi Bauer, Patrycja Dynowska, and Szpak gently demand a conversation, instead. They refrain from spoon-feeding the crowd and break many conventional boundaries of Western theatre. The room divides according to their genetic makeup (we won’t spoil how, but it’s cool). What ensues is a continuously engaging, surprising, curious hour directed by Theodor Spiridon.

It’s genuinely unexpected. The production forgoes all linearity, almost rejecting the idea of telling a singular story in order to open up to a universal narrative. So, what is it about? Genes and ancestry, nature and modernity. Vignettes burst onto the scene to make a point:. researchers explain hereditary mutations, a man grapples with the possibility of memory and hair loss, a woman traces her lineage, and so on. They influence one another, but self-resolve on the spot. By the end, we start thinking that we might actually be the plot and what we’ve been exposed to is a mere suggestion to prod us in the right direction.

Rebuffing all labels, the project is immersive without the need to brand itself as such. It’s also linguistically multi-layered, with the script switching languages in the literal sense with some Polish and German, but vernacularly too, with an abundance of scientific lingo dropped in without much explanation. It plays into an urgent destabilisation of the public. There’s no scope for complacency on either side of the fourth wall and, tonally speaking, all the elements combine into a subtly eccentric delivery that conceals a profound understanding of the world. The stage is used to instigate an exchange that’s woven seamlessly in their stylistic approach rather than by putting up an allegory for the sake of it.

The statement of true disruption, once so dear to fringe aficionados, comes at the very end: the performance closes without any bows or applause. Not necessarily a proclamation to reject egocentrism, but one that breaks down the pretension entirely and removes the work from the fictional space. We leave with levity. Though our very existence is absurd and we may be shackled by our genetic predispositions, we (are) matter.

Three Billion Letters runs at Riverside Studios until 17 August.