MU Drama’s One Acts Showcase in Review: “Passive Observers”

Note: This review contains a reference to murder.

“After returning from yet another pointless battle the Knight and Jester plan a daring escape from the castle.” 

The title Passive Observers struck me as a neoplasm at first. Surely observation implies a kind of passivity? In the play itself, the cast don’t observe much, as conversations happen in hushed rooms and dark corners. We, the audience, are the only party privy to anything going on, but it’s not as though we can get on stage and do something with what we know. As the cast cannot observe any information to act on, they must remain passive, whereas all the audience can do is sit still, and become inundated with plots and relationships otherwise unseen. Naturally, I’ve quite warmed up to the title.

Speaking with Silver Hand Journal, writer-director Wilbur Pearman Howard referred to the depiction of a state of passivity as commentary on being “bystanders in society.” The implication of the audience here fleshes out the sharper edges of Passive Observers’ due cynicism, although Howard hopes that this ultimately teaches the moral that “if someone is in need, you should help them.” Equally, they’ve matched this cynical tragedy with a healthy dose of camp and silliness, a similar line walked by their 2025 Black Box Festival play The Bongle and Peef Show – which incidentally also featured Terence Arones, who plays the Jester in Passive Observers, as a clown. “It’s something I do,” Howard said of their tendency to add clowns to their work: “it’s part of my soul.”

All the cast share this farcical tendency – Howard describes them as “the very extremes” of their archetypes. Terence Arones won the Best Lead Actor accolade at the Drama Society’s One Acts Awards for his performance as the Jester, a slippery, nervy entertainer who constantly speaks in rhymes and longs to escape the castle. They speak in a faux ye olde English, although not so far as to borrow from any Shakespearean standard, and must perpetually think on their feet. They’re paired with the Knight (Daniel Hilfeldt), an exasperated warrior whose combat prowess is as much an object for entertainment to the King (Oscar Verdoire) as the Jester’s performances. Hilfeldt described a great sense of empathy with the Knight, identifying that he “lines up closely with a lot of [my traits]” and that this made the role quite comfortable to slip into. Adversely, the most difficult aspect came about when trying “to have fun with a play that has very serious undertones.” If there was any difficulty, it hardly showed on stage, as Hilfeldt seamlessly manoeuvred from righteous but restrained frustration and apparently indestructible jauntiness (which he credits in-part to the writing, which “transitions very nicely) between the grim and the comical.

The Knight is an excellent foil to the King, whom Verdoire (who won Best Supporting Actor, alongside Tom Breathnach for Welcome to New York) plays with a suitable degree of shouty crackers and perpetual tentativeness. This can be viewed as reactionary not only to the Knight, with whom the King is heavily implied to be having an affair, but also the Queen (Cal De Nicolas Audoin), who is arguably just as tentative but far more deliberate in her expression of it. De Nicolas glides across the stage like a Dalek, coinciding bitterly delivered lines with piercing stares that could shoot you dead. Consequently, the Queen is more overtly having an affair with the Maid (Luca Devine), sister of the Knight and thoroughly well-informed about the castle and its grounds. De Nicolas and Devine won the Best Duo Award for their tender portrayal of the Queen and Maid’s romance.

The Jester plots with the Knight and Maid to escape the castle, but they’re also crucially the only character not emotionally tied to an illicit romance or familial relation – that is to say, they’re the only character to be wholly and unbearably uncomfortable in their situation. While the respective circumstances of the Knight and Maid are too personal and emotionally invested to be a literal example of Gramscian hegemony in the play, the Jester is utterly isolated by their caste. Furthermore, their role within the castle lends itself to having anger projected onto them, whether masked as a critique of their ability as a performer or not. When the Maid reluctantly admits the escape plan to the Queen, and in turn the King, it results in the Jester’s murder – the loss of someone fulfilling the Jester’s purpose is the only major status quo change within the play. This tight-knit, brilliantly archetypical cast do well to make it feel as though, up to and after this point, the Jester is utterly irreplaceable.

The castle is entirely the sum of the cast and their interrelations. Like Cyan Doyle’s vibrant debutante play You’ll Never Suffer Alone, there are points at which the cast arrange the set, literalising with a meta- awareness their participation in maintaining the castle as an actual space and status quo. Where Passive Observers slightly stumbles is in its implication of the audience in maintaining this space. The play is certainly conscientious of us, and how little we can do, with Jester sometimes directly addressing us and lamenting that even we isolate them. However, these addresses seem to come sensationally, at moments of emotional tension, breaking up the continuous, subtextual implication of the audience in the castle’s space. It would certainly be no transformative overhaul to this already incredible play, but I would rather take more of these fourth-wall breaks or none at all.

Passive Observers has been rightfully given further accolades at the Drama Society’s One Acts Awards, beyond what this review has touched on so far. It also took home the accolades for Best Writing, Directing (both to Wilbur Pearman Howard), Best Line, and Best Onstage Moment.

A medieval farce with a grisly underbelly, Passive Observers utterly succeeds as a pressure-cooker observation on caste, and as a reminder to help those we see in need. 

With thanks again to Cyan Doyle, Craig Doyle and the Drama Society committee for their continuous generosity; to Wilbur Pearman Howard for providing production info; to Wilbur Pearman Howard and Daniel Hilfeldt for allowing us an interview; and always to copy editor Jade Hannon for collaboration and companionship at the showcase.