When you’re stranded in a sea of despair – what else is there to do but start swimming?
–synopsis of UMDS’s Start Swimming
Start Swimming is the seventh and final full play in UMDS’s 2025 Autumn Fringe season. It is a pre-published piece, originally written by James Fritz in 2017 as a direct response to another 2017 play named Why it’s All Kicking Off Everywhere, based on Paul Mason’s 2011 book of the same name.
Those six years between book and play saw the world transition from a state of seemingly revolutionary techno-optimism, fuelled by the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, and various other grassroots uprisings worldwide, to one of lethargic malaise. The first election of Donald Trump and the UK’s Brexit vote certainly seemed to signal an end to any fervour for positive change. It is in this context that Start Swimming was written, and it is in the arguably far worse context of eight years later that UMDS have staged their take on it.
Start Swimming opens on… well, they don’t actually have names, or even genders, and in promotional material they are referred to as simply “A” and “B”, but performers Rosa Peterson and Euan Krasinski use she/her and he/him pronouns respectively, so we’ll go with that.
The stage, surrounded on all sides by the audience, is empty but for a small patch of green material in the centre, which B finds himself on. A is outside the green, and asks B what he is doing there. He responds with various answers – breathing, blinking, sweating – and each is greeted with an electric shock delivered to both characters. Eventually, they stumble upon the apparent “correct” answer: B is standing. Standing on the grass. The grass that just so happens to have a “keep off the grass” sign on it.
In just this opening minute, the play establishes how it will unfold over the next hour. A, B and occasionally an ensemble of four (Ella Matthews, Fred Woodley, Summer Marshall, and Bex Buxton) play out various different scenarios in an attempt to avoid punishment. “Incorrect” answers are greeted with electrocution, while “correct” answers result in the flash of a solitary lightbulb suspended above the green. A tries multiple unsuccessful methods to get B off the grass, but B stubbornly refuses to move. “I’m not going anywhere”, he proclaims.
But of course, it’s not really about the grass, is it? B himself points out numerous times that him standing on the grass isn’t actually doing anything to hurt anyone, least of all the grass itself.
The real elegance of Start Swimming as a piece of theatre is that it takes the multitudes of complex, oppressed/oppressor power dynamics that exist within our society, and boils them down to their most essential form. It eschews a conventional plot in favour of metaphor and theme: A and B’s situation is never explained, we never find out anything about them or indeed if what is happening onstage is even supposed to be taken literally.
But Start Swimming is fully aware that these things are wholly unnecessary to the story it wants to tell, and directors Jess Stockley and Henry Pywell should be commended for clearly understanding this. Fritz’s script is completely bereft of stage directions and does not even assign lines to characters; the show can have as large or as small a cast as the director wishes, and the choice to have two primary leads is a genuinely inspired one that allows for the play’s central allegory to be laid thoroughly bare.
B is on the grass. A doesn’t want him there. And A will do whatever she can to get him off it.
“The grass” could be, and indeed is, swapped out for any number of societal institutions that seemingly serve only to reproduce and legitimise the pre-existing hierarchies that are too often accepted as fact. At one point A arrests B for the spurious charge of assaulting an officer. B ends up in court and sentenced to a year in prison. Once he gets out he manages to land a job interview and is hired – only to immediately be fired one line later, as the bosses claim to have just discovered his conviction.
A script as open, minimal, and captivating as this is a demanding one for an actor, but the two leads rise to the challenge with distinction. Krasinski gets the most to do as the downtrodden rebel B, and is astonishingly good throughout. Each and every line drips with unsaid emotion – desperation, terror, fury – and his monologue on the hideous conditions B lives in is possibly the show’s single standout scene, as he commands the audience’s attention through extended pauses and enraged screaming alike.
Peterson as A is the perfect foil, sympathetic to a point as she clearly despairs for B and the situation they are in, but also simply doesn’t (or can’t) understand why B isn’t just getting off the grass. For the Bs of the real world, it isn’t usually that simple, and indeed, one has to ask why they should even be getting off “the grass” in the first place. Peterson’s performance is an understated but incredibly effective one, expertly toeing the line between pitiable and hateable, and she too gets her own monologue later in the play, which is again a show highlight.
The ensemble put in some impressive work too: sometimes called upon to deliver lines as court judges, police officers, or restaurant workers, but primarily adding much-needed depth to the choreography of the electrocution scenes. Eventually, B convinces them to join him in a rebellion, to “drink and dance and fuck on the grass” and to say, again and again and again, that they are not going anywhere. Even A is brought onboard by the end.
Predictably, this results in a barrage of electric shocks being delivered to the group in probably the show’s best design work: Sophie Jerram (lighting) and Deekkshitha Hanumantharaju (sound) provide harsh blue strobe lights and a visceral, screaming soundscape to accompany the intense, almost animalistic depiction of the group’s torture.
But eventually – inevitably – A capitulates. B is still on the grass. A is outside it. The others are nowhere to be seen.
In a different show, B’s revolution might be successful. The Earth might be stripped of grass forever, A might become a trusted ally. But Start Swimming does not do this: it presents revolution as messy and directionless, well-intentioned but ultimately futile. It is a radically, powerfully pessimistic play: one by a writer who examined the slow erosion of hope and optimism throughout the 2010s and came out with a thoroughly defeated script that might have been called alarmist in 2017. Now, almost a decade later, it seems that Fritz was entirely right.
A describes in graphic detail the ways in which she plans to murder B. She is being forced to, yes, but it is telling quite how easily she – the apathetic conformist and collaborator – is pushed into it. With B apparently dead and the others having succumbed to the electrocution, A is left alone, emotionally drained and utterly hollow.
She tries to keep up the charade, but with nobody to string along, nobody who will push back on her and make her sure that she is right, what comes out of her mouth instead is a furious rant about the pointlessness of activism in the twenty-first century: organic avocados, climate change, shit flats, dictatorships, having children as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. If she does everything she’s supposed to, then maybe… maybe what? The world will change?
She’s not going anywhere, she continues to insist. And yet by show’s end she is repeating those same lines once again – only this time she is the persecuted, and B the persecutor.
“What does that sign say? Keep off the grass.”
“And where are you standing? The grass.”
B’s revolution is doomed. A’s conformity is cyclical. The play throws up its hands in defeat.
The show’s synopsis poses one last question that neither A nor B, nor even the play itself, can answer.
What else is there to do?
