The most visually remarkable production to grace the Traverse Stage in years, Arlington. This new Shotput production of Enda Walsh’s dystopian fable is a feast for the eyes, ears, and the darker corners of your brain. It is strange, unsettling, sometimes hilarious, and very occasionally infuriating, but it is never dull.
The set earns its own applause. Designer Anna Yates places Isla, our imprisoned heroine, on a raised metal platform, roughly level with the third or fourth row of Traverse 1, surrounded by the cold glow of surveillance screens. Behind her, a full wall of projection blooms with shifting images, ghostly fragments, data streams, and hints of an outside world, or what might once have been. The stage picture is technically dazzling, a precise marriage of lighting, sound, and video that makes the space feel huge, inescapable, and eerily alive.
We follow Isla, played with fierce delicacy by Aisha Goodman. She has been locked in a tower since the age of four. Now she is thirty-two (ish), and she waits, she waits for her number to be called, for something to happen, for meaning to appear. When she looks from her window, she sees only the neighbouring towers, sometimes she sees figures fall, or pushed, the truth is withheld. Inside the room, an operator, voiced and heard through a speaker by Alex Austin, tracks her every move across a bank of monitors and questions her, asking her to recall childhood places and memories she cannot possibly have lived. The logic refuses to explain itself, and that refusal becomes part of the cruelty.
At one point the platform is plunged into complete darkness and a dancer, Jack Anderson, has taken Islas place. He moves with little grace, but with an inhuman urgent clarity. I read him as another captive in another room, perhaps in another tower. His choreography becomes a conversation with Isla, a physical plea for connection, a revolt conducted in muscle and breath. These dance theatre episodes are among the most startling moments of the night, fusing movement and image in a way that feels pure Shotput; physical, cinematic, and strange.
Is it confusing? Yes. Is it self indulgent? Also, yes. The production does not apologise for any of this. Walsh’s script lives in the poetic and the elliptical, and the company commits to that dream logic rather than tidying it up. We play witness to a work that is dehumanising and humane at once, a study in control, care, and the need to be seen.
On the technical side, a tour de force. The projections and sound design, by Garry Boyle with original music by Cat Myers, lock to the performers with astonishing precision. Emma Jones’s lighting sculpts the room with surgical calm, and Rob Willoughby’s video language keeps widening the world without breaking the spell. It is rare to see the Traverse transformed so completely, and rarer still to feel the technology serve the story so faithfully.
If Arlington has a weakness, it sits in its opacity. The script never quite accounts for why Isla remembers what she cannot have lived, and a few repetitions test my patience. Yet these quibbles feel small beside the ambition and the execution. The piece stays dystopian, dark, and absurdly funny, and it trusts me to be lost, and to find my own way out.
In short, it’s a remarkable piece of theatre. Not perfect, but close enough to make me forget what perfect is.
Reviewer: Greg Holstead
Reviewed: 6th November 2025
North West End UK Rating:
Running time – 1hr 30 mins