The Plot – Summerhall ★★★

Tom Stoppard famously begins Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with a coin spinning through probability, each toss raising questions about fate, free will and authorship. Emma Howlett’s The Plot opens with a different game: keeping a flame alive. It is an image that quietly defines the evening. A small fire passes between hands as competing voices attempt to protect it, shape it or claim ownership of it. History, the play suggests, is much the same thing. A story survives only for as long as somebody keeps feeding the flame. Set in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Howlett’s ambitious new work examines not simply a conspiracy but the stories that grow around it. As accused conspirators await judgement, a playwright attempts to transform events into something useful, creating a theatrical maze in which truth, fiction and survival become increasingly difficult to separate.The writing is unquestionably the production’s greatest strength. Howlett has an impressive ear for language,…