One Way Pendulum

Synopsis

A middle-class British home, primarily the living room, which transforms into a courtroom.

Kirby Groomkirby, a young man obsessed with wearing black, embarks on a bizarre quest for logical pretexts to justify his sartorial choices. His solution? A killing spree of 43 victims, each dispatched with an iron bar after being told a joke. As Kirby’s family grapples with his murderous hobby, his father Arthur constructs an entire courtroom in their living room, while his mother Mabel juggles domestic duties with increasing exasperation. Amidst this chaos, Kirby pursues his grand plan to tilt the Earth’s axis using an army of singing weighing machines, all in pursuit of a perpetual reason to wear black.

N.F. Simpson’s play is a masterclass in absurdist comedy, blending surreal logic with mundane domesticity to create a world both familiar and utterly bizarre. The play’s non-linear structure and rapid-fire wordplay keep the audience off-balance, mirroring the characters’ own bewilderment at their increasingly nonsensical circumstances. Through this lens of absurdity, Simpson explores themes of conformity, logic, and the human need for meaning in a world that often defies explanation. The result is a darkly humorous meditation on the arbitrary nature of societal norms and the lengths to which people will go to justify their actions.