The Plot review – exploding myths in an hour of gunpowder and treason

Never play with matches is good advice – especially when gunpowder is involved. That the historical figures of Thomas and Robert Wintour begin this two-hander testing each other’s capacity to endure a naked flame suggests they have a high tolerance for risk. It is not clear if there are still explosives lying around, but they should know better.

Not that it matters any more. These two Catholic brothers have sussed they must be in purgatory, their plot to blow up parliament having been foiled. Their accounts of what happened next are fuzzy, but they both remember being sentenced to death. They are not happy about their fate, but feel even more sympathy for the mercenary stooge known as Guy Fawkes, who has had to carry the can.

Fawkes has become part of England’s self-mythology. That is one of the threads of the gunpowder plot that intrigues writer-director Emma Howlett most: beyond the simplified myth that justifies today’s 5 November fireworks, she finds a slippery pattern of power play, double dealing and political spin that implicates almost everyone except Fawkes himself.

The intrigue spread through society. Alive to a good story and sensitive to the interests of James I, Shakespeare almost certainly channelled the events of 1605 into Macbeth, with its lesson about what happens to those who try to usurp a king.

All these knotty machinations feed into the TheatreGoose production, as Sophie Kean and Abby McCann put on doublet and hose to tell this very male story. They do so with much energy, but are burdened by the formality of Howlett’s vaguely period text. They declaim the dialogue where it calls for subtlety and fail to match the physical invention and lightness of touch of last year’s Aether. There is an engaging drama in here somewhere – but as it is, this feels more of a history lesson.