An intense and fascinating play An Evening With Defoe – The Plague is totally unexpected in its content and structure. Performed by Shannon Woollard and Phil Roberts, the play starts with Daniel Defoe, the poet and writer most commonly known for his novel Robinson Crusoe, giving a lecture and advertising his new book A Journal of the Plague Year. Launching into his story about the familiarity many of his audience would have to surviving the plague, he is unexpectedly heckled by a peculiar figure in the back of the room. Contradicting the writer and challenging the legitimacy of Defoe’s experiences when it came to the period in which the plague ravaged Europe, the show starts to descend into something slightly short of madness. A witty and sharp performance by both Woollard and Roberts, the two are very clearly comfortable with each other and seemingly riff and ad-lib during multiple sections of the text. So smooth was their transmission between script and almost straight out audience participation, it is entirely possible that the entire performance was completely staged and the apparent improvisation was entirely intentional. The range of ways the two were bantering was diverse to the point where they sat down for something similar as an ‘interview over coffee’ at a writers symposium. At times the show shifts from a dialogue between the two toward a more historical retelling of the life of Defoe and while seamless was unexpected and took a moment for the audience to catch up. It was at times a little difficult to understand Defoe due to the occasional mumble as he was so in character, but this was not often and the rousing singalong that popped up during the show gave him a great opportunity to show how loud and clear he could be. A wild ride but sure worth the time.