Following their enormously successful debut Lessons on Revolution Carmen Collective return to the Edinburgh Fringe with political, experimental performance Gameplay. Devised in response to Keir Starmer stating the UK is on a ‘war footing’, Sam Rees and AJ Turner collaborate on this self-described ‘part performance, part cultural hallucination’. I caught up with Sam Rees about the play - exploring politics, new forms and criticism’s relation to it.

Salvador: Tell us about your journey to GAMEPLAY, what lessons did you learn from Lessons on Revolution, what have you carried forward and what have you left behind?

Sam: GAMEPLAY started as a response to a very specific moment. In 2024, the Prime Minister announced that the UK was now on a "war footing". I found myself thinking about what it means to make performance in a country that is materially involved in the production of violence, while most of us are still going to work, buying coffee and sitting in theatres.

The first version of the project was made through Camden People's Theatre's Starting Blocks programme, and then developed through Pleasance's DREAM BIG commission. It has changed a lot along the way. The show we are taking to Edinburgh is much stranger than the show we started with.

Lessons on Revolutions taught me a lot about scale. That show was very interested in the relationship between the enormous and the completely ordinary: how global political and economic forces end up being experienced through a body, a room, a conversation, a particular Tuesday afternoon. I think GAMEPLAY carries that forward, alongside the core idea of imagination as a political tool.

In terms of what's been left behind? I'm not sure I'll be able to reflect on that until the work has settled a bit. Often, I'll think a project is a massive departure and then realise later down the line that I'm still grappling with the same fundamental questions. To put it glibly, I think if you liked Lessons on Revolution you'll definitely get a kick out of GAMEPLAY.

Salvador: If you would describe your work as political theatre, what do you think that should look like?

Sam: I'm suspicious of the idea that political theatre needs to look a certain way. I don't think political theatre necessarily means a play about a political subject, or a play in which a character makes a good argument about something. Theatre is already political before the play begins. There is the question of who gets to be in the room, who gets to speak, who gets to watch, who has been expected to navigate the space and who the space has been designed for.

So for me, political theatre is partly about making those structures visible. But it is also about what a performance makes possible. I'm perennially fascinated in theatre as a temporary arrangement of people, attention, bodies, time and resources. For a few hours, we agree to be in the same place and to imagine that something is happening. That agreement is incredibly strange. It is also potentially powerful. As people interested in theatre, we can also develop an unhelpful tendency to think that people congregating is inherently a good thing. Sometimes groups of people coming together has disastrous outcomes and crowds can be extremely dangerous things. I also think political theatre should be suspicious of certainty. It should make room for contradiction, pleasure, boredom, confusion, laughter. It should not assume that audiences need to be instructed into having the correct response. And, increasingly, I think it should ask who the theatre is actually being made for.

Salvador: How do you reckon with ideas of Catastrophe? You reflect on Starmer saying the UK is on a "war-footing". Is catastrophe inevitable?

Sam: I don't think catastrophe is inevitable. I think catastrophe is very often presented as inevitable by people who benefit from the decisions that produce it. That doesn't mean I think we can simply decide not to have a catastrophe. There are real material conditions. There are wars. There are bombs. There is climate breakdown. There are systems that are already producing enormous amounts of suffering. But I think there is a difference between saying something is likely and saying it is inevitable. "Inevitable" is a political word. It closes down the possibility of doing anything differently.

One of the things that interests me about catastrophe is how unevenly it is distributed. The end of the world is not a single event that happens to everyone at the same time. For some people, catastrophe has already happened. For other people, it is something they are being asked to imagine. GAMEPLAY takes place in that gap. The audience are sitting in a theatre, watching a show, while something is happening beyond the theatre. The question is what it means to experience catastrophe from a position of relative safety. What does it mean to be a citizen in the imperial core in 2026? I don't think the show has an answer.

I'm reminded that in 1937, just before WW2, the Polish writer Bruno Schulz wrote about history like a train on a track where we are invited to believe that "all the seats within time might have been sold", so our task if to "find, at some point of history, a branch line, a track on which to shunt ourselves". I think there's something to that.

Salvador: Tell us a little bit about the role of sound in this work, how does it contribute to your theatrical experience?
Sam: Music is performed live throughout the show by composer AJ Turner. Alongside their incredible talent, AJ has also been instrumental in thinking about how sound itself is not apolitical. A core subject in the piece is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. As the Soviet Union fell, the government put a recording of the ballet on television on a continuous loop to keep the population calm. 

Since then, the music has been repurposed by Russian dissidents, artists and protestors to express opposition to Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. We're very interested in how music is never a neutral object; that felt particularly important for a show that is also thinking about access. The sound isn't there to illustrate what is happening visually. It is part of the world of the show. It helps build the world alongside the text, the performers and the audience's imagination. The theatre is full of things that aren't there. Sound is one of the ways we make that absence feel present.

Salvador: How related are thinking and listening?

Sam:  We've been considering this a lot. GAMEPLAY is one of only a handful of shows at Edinburgh integrating audio description into the fabric of the piece to invite partially sighted audiences to take part in the experience. I think listening is a form of thinking. We often imagine thinking as something that happens privately, inside your own head, and listening as something more passive. But listening is an active process of interpretation. You are constantly deciding what matters, what you believe, what you don't understand, what you want to follow.

And I think that becomes particularly interesting in a theatre. One of the things we have been thinking about is how much of the world we construct from incomplete information. You hear something coming from another room. You hear a siren. You hear someone describe something you cannot see. You make a world out of it.

That is also what politics is often asking us to do. We are constantly trying to understand systems that are too large to see in their entirety. So I think the relationship between thinking and listening is quite intimate. Both involve making connections between things that are not necessarily presented to you as a complete picture.

Salvador: You refer to the play as part performance experiment, part cultural hallucination. How does each term manifest in the work?

Sam:  The performance experiment is partly about asking what theatre can do when you take some of its basic assumptions apart. What happens if the audience is asked to imagine something rather than have it presented to them? What happens if audio description is not an additional service attached to the performance, but part of the dramaturgy itself? What happens if the description of an object becomes as theatrically important as the object? The show is interested in the fact that theatre is already a collective act of imagination. We just tend to disguise that by giving you a set, some lights and asking you to pretend that what is in front of you is real.

The cultural hallucination is perhaps the show becoming less interested in maintaining those distinctions. It begins in something recognisable: an audience comes to a theatre to watch a show. There is a critic. There is a performer. There is a world outside the building. But then those things start to bleed into one another. The show becomes interested in the strange stories that a culture tells itself about itself: about war, civilisation, criticism, progress, the future. A hallucination isn't necessarily an escape from reality. Sometimes it is reality with the logic turned up too high.

Salvador: GAMEPLAY features in some way Daily Mail critic Quentin Letts - how does your play engage with theatre criticism? Often, artists are told to learn from critics. What could critics learn from artists?

Sam:  I think criticism is a really important part of theatre. The problem is that the relationship between artists and critics is often imagined as a one-way hierarchy: the artist makes the thing, and the critic arrives afterwards to explain whether it was any good. GAMEPLAY is interested in what happens when the critic is not outside the work, but becomes part of the world of the work.

Quentin Letts is a particularly useful figure for that because his criticism often presents itself as a kind of common sense when it has historically been intensely political. There is a very powerful idea of the critic as the person who can tell you what is really happening: this is good, this is bad, this is pretentious, this is what normal people think.

But criticism is also a performance. It has a voice, a persona, a set of conventions. The critic is performing authority. So the show isn't really trying to attack one critic. It is more interested in the cultural role that a figure like that can come to occupy.

Far be it for me to advise critics on what they might be able to learn. We raise a question throughout the show about why words are important to leave behind and consider not just what the artists' legacies might be, but also those who write, think and talk about theatre for a living; at the end of the day, what sort of messy and incomplete archive have we all left for the future? It's a question for all of us.

Salvador: What are you most looking forward to at Edinburgh Fringe? Would you recommend any other shows?

Sam:  I'm looking forward to the feeling of being completely surrounded by theatre again. The Fringe can be exhausting and absurd and financially terrifying, but there is something incredible about being in a city where everyone is temporarily trying to make something happen. Though I'm sure that lots of locals might have different opinions on that, which is more than valid, especially from those not rich enough to escape the city for the month by renting out their massive houses.

I'm also looking forward to experiencing the show with audiences. We have spent so long thinking about GAMEPLAY as an idea, and then as a rehearsal room, and then as a collection of technical problems. At the Fringe it finally becomes a thing that belongs to other people for an hour. I'm particularly excited to see what happens when audiences bring their own imaginations to it.

Honestly? I could name a billion artists you should go and see but fundamentally the whole point of the Fringe is that you can walk into something because the title sounds strange, or because a friend has recommended it, or because you have ten pounds and an hour to kill. I'd implore people to find the work made by those who need you there. Go find the migrant artists, the trans artists, the working class artists. Whatever you do, seek out shows that expand your horizons, it's still the best place in the world to do that.

You can catch GAMEPLAY at the Pleasance Dome from 5-31 August at 14.40 (Runtime One Hour). Tickets available here 

Salvador Kent, July 2026