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Reviews Archive 2008
Reviews Archive 2009
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Edinburgh Festival Fringe August 2009
Total Theatre Award Winners Edinburgh Fringe 2009
Award for Emerging Company
Award for Devised Performance
Innovation/Interaction/Immersion
Award for Physical/Visual Theatre
Award for Music and Theatre
Other Shows Reviewed at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009
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Total Theatre Award Winners Edinburgh Fringe 2009
All Award Winners reviewed by Dorothy Max Prior
Award for Emerging Company
The River People
Lilly Through the Dark
Bedlam Theatre
2009 was the year of white-face clown, petticoated Victoriana and quirky stringed instruments at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe! Perhaps it’s the Steampunk influence? The River People may share this Gothic sensibility with many other companies, but what marks them out is the interesting marriage of form and content, for they have taken the brave step of using their own difficult autobiographical material as the subject of their shows – in the case of Lilly Through the Dark, the subject is coping with bereavement. It’s a tale told with artful sensitivity, and just the right mix of pathos and humour. Lilly had previously been presented in Edinburgh at The Bedlam as a work-in-progress, and it was good to see the company taking the sound decision to return for a second year with this show in its developed form, invigorated by a new design. A life-affirming story about death, beautifully told.
Award for Devised Performance
Beady Eye/Kristin Fredricksson
Everything Must Go (Or the Voluntary Attempt to Overcome Unnecessary Obstacles)
Augustine’s
Kristin Fredricksson had some stiff competition in this category, which included no less than three former Total Theatre Award-winners (Hoipolloi, Company FZ, and Inspector Sands). Everything Must Go is an everything-including-the-kitchen-sink show, and features robust physical performance, puppetry, object theatre, projection, and monologue in an autobiographical piece that is, in essence, a eulogy to Fredricksson’s recently-deceased father. Karl Fredricksson is a long-haired, cross-dressing former athlete who would, had he not died, have performed in the show with her. He may be dead, but in his absence he is very much present onstage. Images of the man are everywhere: on screen in super-8 home movies; in cardboard cut-outs; as a giant mannequin that ‘observes’ her for most of the show, eventually joining her for a last waltz. For one hour only we get to know and love this man, and when it finishes we experience a real sense of bereavement. Heartbreaking but soul-enriching.
Innovation/Interaction/Immersion
Adrian Howells
Foot-Washing for the Sole
The Arches at St Stephens
The past few years have seen an increasing number of shows that challenge the traditional divide between ‘onstage’ and ‘audience’ space – through the immersion of the audience into a created environment, through the creation of an intimate exchange between performer and audience member, or through the encouragement of active participation of the audience in the action. Thus, the Total Theatre Awards judges in this category found themselves cycling (Rider Spoke), sniffing the night air in the Botanical Gardens (Power Plant), building miniature cities (Home Sweet Home), non-stop-shopping at the supermarket (Wondermart), or perhaps even having their feet massaged... The winning show in this category, Adrian Howells' Foot Washing for the Sole, is a performance work for an audience of one. Howells is a highly competent performer who exudes an air of confidence, trust and authority. Whilst washing and massaging the feet with tender loving care, he shares his thoughts on the symbolic relevance of feet washing, and the cultural resonances associated (such as the story of Christ washing his disciples’ feet), which leads easily into reflections on the current situation in the Middle East, and on notions of ‘peace’ and ‘service’. It’s a gem of a piece, small but perfectly formed.
Award for Physical/Visual Theatre
Clod Ensemble
Under Glass
Pleasance at McEwan Hall
Under the revised rules for eligibility for the Awards 2009, late-opening shows could enter the shortlist if seen and nominated by two judges. Under Glass was thus seen in the last week of the festival, highly recommended for inclusion in the shortlist, and subsequently won the Award for Physical/Visual Theatre. Under Glass is a promenade piece, but rather than wander freely, the audience are immersed in almost total blackout, their attention drawn to a series of glass boxes or framed stages by an imaginative use of light and sound. Each performer uses their ‘station’ to great effect, creating a series of moving pictures that explore a whole plethora of issues around ‘containment’, ‘framing’, and ‘the gaze’. There is no one ’thing’ that the piece is about, but there are a multitude of possibilities suggested: from scientific experiment to art exhibit; from peep show to the imprisonment of office life… A great concept, well realised, with a wonderful integration of all its constituent elements – a truly ‘total’ theatre piece.
Award for Music and Theatre
Dafydd James/Ben Lewis
My Name is Sue
Pleasance Courtyard
My Name is Sue starts with the entrance through the auditorium of a person with a gawky haircut, dressed in a simple wool dress and cardigan, who perches herself perkily on the piano stool, switches on her chintzy standard lamp, and introduces herself in a lilting Welsh accent: ‘Hello, my name is Sue, and I’m here to sing you some songs.’ Later, there’s a perfectly realised theatrical moment as three more ‘Sues’ take their place on stage, relentlessly straight-faced and staring as they provide accompaniment on cello, violin, and drums. Sue’s offbeat ditties – delivered in a quavering falsetto – tell of a life marred by strange encounters, sudden bereavements, and puzzling events. We start to wonder if everything is as it seems – Sue has had more than her fair share of ‘accidental occurrences’, and we watch her reach for the pill bottle on top of the piano more than once, washing a handful down with what we suspect might be gin drunk through a straw… but regardless, we allow ourselves to be drawn into her slightly wonky world, and by the end she has us all clapping our hands and singing along to the cheery refrain: ‘We’re All Going to Die!’
Co-written and directed by Ben Lewis (of Inspector Sands), with Sue played with perfectly-pitched precision by Welsh (male) musician/composer Dafydd James, My Name is Sue toys cleverly with the notion of the ‘unreliable narrator’ and creates a wonderful onstage world that draws us in with a horrified attraction to its occupants. Good songs too!
Other Reviews from Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2009
Dancing Brick
6.0: How Heap and Pebble took on the World and Won
Pleasance Dome
Dancing Brick’s latest show sparkles in the Pleasance Dome. Heap Krusiak and Pebble Adverati are skating champions who must adapt to a world without ice. This lovely idea is developed with physical ingenuity. Thomas Eccleshare and Valentina Ceschi capture gushing celebrity and coy emptiness perfectly, with every twitch. The ice dance champions, a Torvill and Dean satire, are very funny. Their greatest work includes Escape, a political piece in which they play Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Apollo features Neil Armstrong and the lunar docking model, while shaving 18 seconds off Holst’s The Planets.
The theme of global warming is cleverly understated. The pair struggle to perform on a wooden floor because the ice has melted, but the environmental catastrophe is not overdone; instead, explored through comedy. Details of the design, costumes and music also work well. Heap nonchalantly wastes plastic bottles of a bright blue sports drink, taking a single sip from each, even before giving Pebble hers. Audio ranges from birdsong to White Christmas. The comic timing is perfect, including the audience participation. Three volunteers receive whispered or card instructions to play interviewers, and are always handled sensitively.
My only quibble is with the structure of the show. This is nicely non-linear, with the stars taking final bows throughout. However, the shape of the piece can seem flat, with the story left hanging. This is nonetheless a beautiful follow-up to last year’s 21:13 . Eccleshare and Ceschi are two engaging young performers with… star quality.
Charlotte Smith
Cynthia Hopkins
Accidental Nostalgia
Traverse Theatre
Our protagonist can’t remember whether she has killed her father or not. She thinks she may have– certainly she was abused, so she goes on the run adopting a series of disguises; just in case.
Accidental Nostalgia starts with live music and projection adding layer after delicious layer so that by the end your senses are filled with the smell (yes, smell) and sight and sound of this complex and beautiful show, and you just don’t want it to stop. Of course, it doesn’t, that’s the point of the show: that we will continue to decipher and remember and rewrite our experience perpetually. Perhaps I’m gushing, but this work deserves a little gush.
Cynthia Hopkins along with Jim Findlay and Jeff Snug work tirelessly to weave magic with video, live filming, photos, projection, music, costume, dance and a fresh pot of Moroccan coffee to make a show that is carefully balanced and delicately intricate. It’s a live examination of how we create memory and perception, a testing of how we build stories from disparate visual and aural information and, ultimately, an invitation to question the worth of our own experiences. With such unreliable tools to hand are we qualified to validate our own lives?
Hopkins has a droll, professorial style of speaking with a soothing monotony that shies away from any indulgence in emotional outbursts or drama. The drama in this piece is in the creation. I found it moving, and hugely inspiring.
Wendy Windle
Precarious
Anomie
Zoo Southside
Precarious live up to their name with Anomie. Dancers fling themselves onto the large metal structure which frames their stage, shakily dangling from ropes. At the outset, six huge flat-screen televisions light up with Sin City-style animations of near-naked bodies. The screens begin moving upwards, revealing six scantily-clad dancers writhing and contorting, trapped in their own worlds, each alone with a single white mattress. What follows is a physical theatre piece which exudes energy and slaps you over the head with its message for 70 minutes of non-stop hardcore dance music and matching high octane choreography.
The animations impressively sketch a dark, harsh city where six youthful urbanites, lost and lonely, each search for a way to connect with others around them. We’ve seen all of these people before: a woman longs for a baby; a man sits in front of his computer willing e-mails to arrive; a nervous woman lives her life through superstition. Each character has their own monologue which sums up their loneliness; on every occasion their words lack any hint of subtlety.
There are some beautiful images and creative uses of the mattresses to create a changing architecture and landscape – a man and woman touchingly find each other by reaching their fingers through a hole in a mattress. The multimedia elements are technically impressive (although when the dancers lose synchronicity the magic evaporates), but there isn't an understated moment in sight. Within five minutes Precarious have told us everything they set out to tell us and then repeat it in different guises for an hour.
Terry O’Donovan
Grid Iron
Barflies
Traverse at The Barony Bar
Scrawled in chalk on the pub blackboard: ‘If I had to choose between drinking and fucking I think I would have to give up fucking.’ Welcome to the world of Charles Bukowski – or is it the world of his alter-ego Henry Chinaski? It’s hard to tell. Set in a real working bar, Barflies takes beat poet Bukowski’s work and life as its subject, with Grid Iron’s starting point a selection of Bukowski’s short stories, weaved together to form a linear narrative. (Mostly ‘realist’ in tone but for one magic realist story of a man who shrinks until he is just six inches tall, then gets used as a dildo.) To be fair, Grid Iron make no biographical claims, and yet this imposed narrative somehow bolsters up the common confusion between Bukowski’s works of fiction and the facts of his life.
But putting that aside, and moving on to what Grid Iron actually do with their chosen material – the mahogany-and-mirrors environment of the Barony Bar is a great space, and Grid Iron use it to brilliant effect, the audience seated at tables with Whisky Sours; the blackboards embellished with Bukowski bon mots; a blue neon sign bearing the legend Sloefuck flickering above the action. There’s charged performances from the cast of three – poet-drunkard ‘Henry’, an ‘everywoman’ female character who is humped and bumped on bar and table and floor, and (my favourite) the witness to our poet’s excesses and despairs, Silent Dave the barman, who doubles as singer/musician, as when he accompanies himself on the Old Joanna for a rendition of Lilac Wine.
I don’t feel that this is Grid Iron at their best – but nevertheless, a good piece of theatre, presented with the professionalism and panache we would expect from Edinburgh ’s finest. Dorothy Max Prior
Analogue
Beachy Head
Pleasance Dome
Two documentary makers find they have filmed a man throwing himself off Beachy Head . Unable simply to erase the footage, they start investigating the story of 29-year-old Stephen Mitchell and his wife, Amy.
Expectations are high for this new show by Analogue, who proved a hit at the Edinburgh Festival with Mile End two years ago. The piece is well-acted and multi-layered. Theatre, onstage filming and pre-recorded footage combine, so the narrative is framed many times. If that sounds a bit knowing or theoretical, it is balanced by warm, well-drawn characters. Hannah Barker plays a determined pathologist, who explains that someone dies every half second, and someone kills themselves every hour and a quarter. Stephen comes alive through memories, his children’s stories, and a final conversation. Amy (Emma Jowett), Matt (Daniel Tobin) and Joe (Lewis Hetherington) form a good triangle, with tension and suspense as the filmmakers put off telling Amy that they have actually recorded her husband’s suicide.
The production can at times be clunky and melodramatic. The open set changes may be intended as an advanced alienation effect, but come across as cluttering at times. Emotive music is satirised (the filmmakers jokingly try Careless Whisper), but also played loudly. Ghostly, repeated images show Stephen about to jump. Ultimately, this is a dedicated piece, with its own style of theatre. Details such as the standard lamp or pathologist’s boxes give texture, and the heavy subject of death and depression sometimes has unexpected lightness.
Charlotte Smith
Idle Motion
Borges and I
The Zoo
It is with great humility and care that Idle Motion present us with this beautifully crafted biography play about Argentinean writer Jorge Borges and his decent into blindness mirrored by the modern day tale of Sophie and her book club friends.
This is the second piece from this young company and their attention to detail and cohesiveness of form and content were quite beyond their years. Yes, there are mistakes that a more discerning eye might have cut – though any cutting here is needed with a scalpel, not an axe. Sometimes there is so much happening on stage that it’s hard to know where to look. Object animation (and occasional paper figure puppetry) features strongly throughout, some of which works well and some of which doesn’t. A few of the actors are prone to what I call ‘dance face’, and at one point there’s so much naked flesh on stage that it’s hard to focus on the point of it all.
However, such treats as Sophie walking on stacks of books to take her first blind steps; books becoming an aeroplane; a myriad of sight tests spelling out the ‘O’ we all feel when Sophie’s blindness is confirmed; a city made of books; a well executed book tango; and the sound of a softly cascading domino of – you’ve guessed it– books, show the great poetic and imaginative potential of this company.
What we have here is a show that is genuinely moving without a trace of sentimentality and thought provoking without a hint of a lectern. Very, very well done.
Wendy Windle
You Need Me
Certain Dark Things
Underbelly
Following on from their 2008 success with the wartime romance How It Ended, You Need Me returned to Edinburgh with another investigation of twentieth-century European history, Certain Dark Things.
Like their previous work, this piece draws on real-life stories, is staged in the round, devised by the cast, and directed by Emily Watson Howes. The company of Basque, Spanish and English actors cleverly use a combination of physical and verbal languages, completely immersing their audience in this dramatic world. The soundtrack is produced live by the mournful tones of a solo cello and the cast using makeshift instruments.
Certain Dark Things explores the sexual awakening of a young Basque man under Franco’s brutal dictatorship of the 1950s. The scene is set by Basque women gossiping in the communal laundry and it soon becomes clear that Bilbao life conceals dark undertones of repression and distrust. The claustrophobia of overhanging streets (marked by onstage lines of clothing) proves a fitting backdrop to the tale of the young protagonist Mikel whose life is thrown into chaos when feelings for one of his father’s male colleagues lead him to spurn his childhood sweetheart and embark on an erotically charged relationship, leaving him and his family fearing for their lives.
Fast-forward to Madrid in 1971 and the frenzied raw emotion of previous scenes gives way to touching scenes of marital life with Mikel helping his new wife with household tasks. Mikel then makes the long and painful journey back to Bilbao where he is forced to confront his past demons…
You Need Me’s gripping narrative and seamless ensemble work in Certain Dark Things made them well-deserving of their place on the Total Theatre Awards shortlist.
Frances Bryce
Fearghus O’Conchúir
Dialogue
Dance Base
Dialogue is a duet between Fearghus O'Conchúir and the miniscule Chinese dancer Li Ke with the technical and musical accompaniment of Yin Yi. It begins promisingly with O’Conchúir chatting to the audience. He casually asks us why we have come to Dance Base at 1pm – with most people responding with ‘There was nothing else on at this time!’ During the conversation, the striking Li Ke slowly moves her hand then bends her leg, her back to the audience. Her body is oozing with energy and precision.
O'Conchuir leaves the audience and begins heavily leaping across the stage, elongating his long tall body with outstretched movements. The pair are completely opposite in height, energy and movement quality which they exploit and explore throughout the piece. Unfortunately for Conchúir, in contrast to him, Ke is startlingly watchable – the smallest dip of her head is full of meaning. His movements seem empty in comparison.
Throughout the piece, Yin Yi contributes projections of video both live and recorded. He humorously interrupts the duo to ask if they'd like some water which leads to a cleverly underplayed chat about colours – green is trees, white is gold, red is fire. Yi films himself marking a sheet of white paper which is projected onto the wall behind them: the words fire, water, wood, gold and earth are marked on the sheet. The dancers then perform their interpretations of these words. Dialogue has potential to make interesting comments about our similarities and differences. However, in order to become a cohesive whole it needs to create more significant links between sections and engage more directly with its audience to keep us interested.
Terry O’Donovan
Tabula Rasa Dance Company
Dilly Dilly
Dance Base
In a verdant back garden a wide-eyed Tara Hodgson arrives decked out in pilot hat, long coat and deep red dress. She holds two orange pipes which she spins maniacally around her. They whizz and shriek; her mouth opens wide as the noise emitted from the pipes becomes her excited voice. She's a keen adventurer ready to spot any opportunity to launch herself into a new scenario of fun, danger or discovery.
Her pipes help her to morph into an elephant, a sword fighter, or a champion skipper, in the blink of an eye. Angus Dunn and Brian Gorman's set design is littered with tall flowers, autumnal leaves and a bucket in which Hodgson regularly buries her head. She dances joyously to Quee MacArthur's infectious soundtrack of trombones and trumpets, poems and songs, as her journeys pop up on a circular screen full of charming digital images. At one point she takes flight– whirling herself in circles before landing on her stomach, arms and legs stretched out in all directions. A gorgeous aerial drawing, made by pupils of Ardross Primary School, floats on the screen as Hodgson waves to a passing boat.
Choreographer Claire Pencak has devised a seamlessly charming piece which Hodgson performs with passion and delicacy. In one scene she delicately picks a handful of petals which become her eyes and mouth – she perfectly captures the innocence and resourcefulness of a lone child determined to play all day.
Terry O’Donovan
Les Enfants Terribles /Pins and Needles Productions
Ernest and the Pale Moon
Pleasance Courtyard
From the opening image of a white-faced man leaping to his feet in panic, Ernest and the Pale Moon hooks us with a well-paced and beautifully-staged creepy faux-historical tale of Ernest – a man locked up in a dark insane asylum for a murder of horrific proportions. Drawing on the worlds of Tim Burton, Edgar Allen Poe and classic mime, the play is an atmospheric and riveting physical theatre experience.
The four-strong ensemble cleverly employ the use of live ‘Foley’ sound effects and music to simply and effectively create reactions, responses and commentaries on the action (Rachel Dawson on cello is particularly well-used). As a hospital nurse shows a visitor around the insane asylum, she sharply mimes the opening of a slit in the door whilst other performers instantly break into haunting shrieks of madness.
The story is narrated by the ensemble, with characters emerging at the drop of a hat. Grace Carter as the almost blind Gwendoline is both creepy and sweet at once, with her pale eyes searching for the light of the moon which gives her comfort. When her eyes dart from side-to-side following the flickering of a flashlight, it seems she is the heroine of a silent movie. Her would-be suitor, Joe Woolmer, subtly brings to life a lost soul whose one chance of happiness is cruelly snatched away from him. Oliver Lansley’s script celebrates Hitchcockian suspense and playfully jumps back and forth, slowly revealing the hidden truth, with the incessant tick-tock of the clock continually reminding us that time is running out.
Terry O’Donovan
Babolin Theatre/Gomito Productions
Hou Hou Shahou’s Chorus of Descent
Bedlam Theatre
The full potential of ironing boards, washing lines and rubber gloves is sounded out in Hou Hou Shahou’s Chorus of Descent. This madcap piece centres on a crowd of Cockney washerwomen in the depths of Paris . Zola and the carnivalesque are cited as influences; the literary rhymes sometimes sound Shakespearian; and the narrator ponders genetic codes and socio-economics. Yet the show avoids being obscure or patronising through sheer glee. The ensemble work is excellent, with every member always lively and fully concentrated, so it’s a patchwork that doesn’t miss a stitch.
The characters also shine through, including the narrator ‘Teresa’ (played in drag, as are many other roles), the long-suffering heroine Ginny (who slides deeper into poverty) and her wayward daughter, wobbly husband and kind landlady. There are imaginative transition moments, such as when an ironing board becomes a bar, and the design is distinctive and bright. Nice touches include using clothes-hangers as the children. At best, the songs sound like The Threepenny Opera. The music can also be rough around the edges, perhaps intentionally so, with some grating, off-key song and saxophone.
The show is created by Babolin Theatre, in association with Gomito Productions, back in Edinburgh for a fourth successive and successful year at Bedlam Theatre. This latest piece is directed and co-written by Richard Fredman, and devised with the ten-strong cast.
Hou Hou Shahou’s Chorus of Descent is young, exuberant and sometimes a bit studenty. The ‘shahou’ – perhaps a curse, spirit or love’s arrow (it means archery in Japanese) – remains a mystery. But the piece certainly has pizzazz.
Charlotte Smith
Tom Duggan, Tom Lyall & Mischa Twitchin
I Wonder Sometimes Who I Am
Forest Café/ Forest Fringe
We sit in complete darkness (or at least as complete as the Forest Fringe can manage), and we are surrounded by sound. The sound penetrates the darkness, wraps us, comforts and disturbs us, is somehow inside us and outside of us. Schoenberg’s music – degenerate music, as the Nazis would have it – is everywhere, all around us, wonderfully crackly, the early gramophone it is played on adding its own layers to the sound. And those trademark Schoenberg declaimed lyrics… the odd and lovely songs, the melancholy voices of fallen angels. There are other voices too; phrases of spoken language, mostly fast and German, sometimes slow and English; multi-layered, the phrases merging with the music to make a different sort of music. A political rally, raised voices, chanting. Now a gentle voice reflective, musing: ‘I wonder sometimes who I am…’ It’s as if we are listening to one radio broadcast, and there’s at least two others playing at the same time. This feels familiar – I often go to sleep listening to Radio 3… Is there something in the room? It’s hard to tell what’s seen and what’s imagined – in the darkness, imagination and memory merge, ideas are animals. Everything is seen, everything is real. Is this what Schoenberg means by ‘sounds for the eyes’? A ‘transfigured night’.
Out of the darkness come flashes of light. A desk lamp switched on/switched off. Illumination: a pair of hands, naked, wringing out their sorrows. Now one hand bare, one hand gloved in black leather; now both hands blood-red. When there’s nothing but the hands, the hands become the face, the body. Later, a burst of flame leaps out of the darkness; surrounded by blackness, it feels like a great conflagration. The destruction of Dresden , Coventry .
Schoenberg, like all who are exiled, sits between cultures. He’s on the edge of the Old and New Worlds. A Romantic and a Modernist. I Wonder Sometimes Who I Am… explores the liminal – the point of change between light and dark, between ‘meaning’ and ‘feeling’, between consciousness and unconsciousness. Leaving the performance space, the question to ask is not ‘what does it mean?’ but ‘how do I feel?’ I feel like I’ve been on a journey, that my head has been filled, that I’ve sat and watched pictures flickering in the fire, that I’ve travelled through time, that I’ve made a greater acquaintance with the subject of the piece, Schoenberg.
Artaud talked of making a theatre that honoured the profound, poetic bearing of dreams – I Wonder Sometimes Who I Am comes closer than most to that ideal. A beautiful, entrancing piece that makes colourful pictures with sound, and suggests lost worlds with pictures that we are not sure if we really saw or merely imagined… synaesthesia for the soul.
Dorothy Max Prior
Camden People’s Theatre
Icarus 2.0
Pleasance Below
The venue is a tight fit for the set, actors, and audience – although the claustrophobic feel turns out to be just perfect for Icarus 2.0. The highly disturbing onstage world we find ourselves locked into is peopled by only two characters – a father (who shifts dangerously from the cloying to the combative) and an eerily naive pubescent son, shut away from what we are led to believe is a dangerous outside world. A third ‘absent character’ is a wife/mother referred to with terse disapproval that masks desperate longing (the father), or just plain unmasked desperate longing (the son).
Their onstage ‘home’ is less a theatre set than a lovingly constructed installation – a mad professor’s den of jars, bottles, tools, and accumulated junk. Why are these two locked in here together? An outside world exists, or once existed – evidenced in letters, and mentions of a former family life and a lost daughter. The crackling sound of a radio seeps in – the shipping forecast, or a straining, slow-mo version of the theme from Dirty Dancing. There are occasional forays to the outside world, which involve protective wear and safety ropes, but we are not party to what is seen outside – we are held inside. Only ‘Icarus’ leaves, returning bruised, battered, and bewildered by what he finds. Eventually, he takes flight… with a predetermined outcome.
Intense, funny, shocking, surreal… Icarus 2.0 can be read as a parable of the adolescent male need to push past the father; as an investigation of the line between parental love and abuse; as an exposition of the idea that for a child struggling to live up to the memory of a dead sibling, death can have a fatal attraction… it’s all this and so much more.
Dorothy Max Prior
Ontroerend Goed
Internal
The Traverse at Mercure Point Hotel
His name’s Joeri. He’s 31, short blond hair, blue eyes. He looks at me quickly and again, quite intently, as people reshuffle – so we stand opposite each other. We sit down at a small table and have a thimbleful of schnapps. It is easy to talk.
Ontroerend Goed’s latest production is deceptively simple. Recreating a speed dating quest for romance, Internal gently pushes the boundaries, with questions posed about lovers and friends. Before you know it, you’re holding hands. The intimacy is not cheap, although partly manufactured. The group is brought back together to share, kiss and dance. A woman takes off her knickers and tries to lead her partner away, but he holds back.
Internal is not the only confessional show in Edinburgh , but it’s sensitively done. The streamlined Art Deco elegance of the Mercure Point Hotel provides a good setting, and the theatricality is palpable, with the actors’ dressing tables on view, and a curtain that rises and falls between the couples.
The piece questions intimacy and power dynamics – I’m accused of wanting to control the situation – but the actors keep a tight rein on the timing, the fantasy games, and the group conversation.
By the end, I’m writing down my address as Joeri obliging bends over (Les Liaisons Dangereuses meets Brüno’s Mexican chair people). I almost forget the street name and the script is wobbly. I wonder whether he’ll write. I know he has 239 other people to accommodate over the festival and find out online that he’s deeply unavailable, but I still wonder where this leads.
Charlotte Smith
Ulrike Quade
Me Too – A Sideshow
New Town Theatre
Ulrike Quade is contorted in a bizarre costume to play Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton, who became a vaudeville act in the 1920s.
This freakish set-up is disturbing and original enough, but Me Too – A Sideshow pushes the boundaries further. The explicit material includes mobile naked body parts, gyrating vibrators, bunny ears, and a live simulation of childbirth. The movement work is inventive and open. It’s not professional ventriloquism, as the performer conspicuously fails to hide her own speech. However, she does manipulate the costume skilfully, creating a series of two-headed tableaux.
The puppetry, film and design are expert. The main puppet characters, including the sisters’ clairvoyant son Arthur, come alive. Shadow projections of the rabbit costumes work particularly well, adding an eerie glamour. Me Too – A Sideshow is visually strong throughout, even if the plot has grotesque and ludicrous twists. A simple trick sees song lyrics projected one-by-one, so every word lingers. City lights dance in another piece of animation. Ulrike performs a gutsy cabaret song alone in one filmed section, railing at a man called Johnny. This more familiar number could suggest that the kitsch freak show is not so far from today’s music or sex industry. But the piece resolutely refuses to make any overt post-feminist point.
Me Too – A Sideshow may not be something that you’d recommend as family entertainment. However, it can be extraordinary and oddly beautiful, showcasing a performer at the top of her very strange game.
Charlotte Smith
New International Encounter (NIE)
My Life With the Dogs
Pleasance Courtyard
Strangers in the Night is something of a theme tune in New International Encounter’s latest production. But Frank Sinatra’s twinkly blue eyes are also oceans away from the dark tale of My Life with the Dogs.
Four-year-old Ivan Mishukov lives in a small flat near Moscow , and is not welcome while his vodka-soaked mother and Uncle Boris ‘make the noises’. He runs away, eludes a paedophile, and (a true story) survives for two years living with wild street dogs. This is rich material for physical theatre. As well as a panting pack of dogs, the movement includes television broadcasts (an actor with a hollow set around his head), and tableau vivant images of the wayward mother and Boris caught red-handed.
The piece is set in 1995 and the political transition from communism is also felt (the Scorpions’ Winds of Change is another anthem). We see Ivan outside a sweetshop, looking at new fizzy drinks and chocolate, then dangerously lured away with a hot dog. Fairytale traditions combine with witty ensemble theatre devices and vibrant music. The audience are addressed directly, and it’s particularly funny when we are told to imagine a Mancunian actor in his forties as a child, or a 37-year-old who has just taken up jogging as a Russian policeman.
There are some similarities with previous NIE production The End of Everything Ever (the last work of a trilogy exploring early 20th century experiences) – both focus on a lost small child in a harsh adult world. Perhaps this just means that the company has a distinctive, haunting style, rather than that they are getting stale. My Life with the Dogs starts a new trilogy that explores more recent European history.
Charlotte Smith
Jumbled
Oh My Green Soap Box
Pleasance Courtyard
Lucy Foster and director Mark Tweddle have created a bittersweet tale of one woman’s search for human connection through her campaign to save the polar bears in the Antarctic. She cleverly uses the epic scale of her lone campaign to echo the proportions of loneliness in her life. In this one-woman show she flits between underplayed stories about regretful one-night stands, and the plight of the polar bears and their dying landscape of snow.
The piece is reminiscent of Tim Crouch’s recent material, which plays with the notions of ‘identity’ and ‘acting’. Foster seems to be playing herself – or is she? The text seems autobiographical, a slight self-parody, but perhaps that’s all just a ruse. In the opening moments she both introduces herself and self-consciously acts out the varying postures of powerful politicians’ body language. Throughout the performance she humorously undermines her character who can never manage to be quite the climate control saviour that she sets out to be. She quietly makes you wonder about how much wind we can create, talking about how much we’d like to make change happen, but usually returning to our personal problems before the recycling.
Rather than deal with her singledom, Foster throws her energy into saving the bears, including the creation of a surreal and hilarious propaganda video in which Foster wanders the streets of East London in a giant bear costume. She utilises a male volunteer exceedingly cleverly, managing to get him calmly into bed with her and hilariously delivering lines of text. The entire piece is subtle, playful and funny, resulting in a tale of delicate poignancy which is sad and hilarious, absurd and truthful.
Simon Chatterton/Mark Anderson/Ann Bean et al
Power Plant
Royal Botanic Gardens
A night-time trip to the park is always exciting… through the gate we go, sent down a path, told to follow the light. Now here’s the glasshouse, projections highlighting its metal skeleton. We weave inside and outside, I lose my companions and end up off the beaten track, peeping behind ferns, crunching gravel underfoot. If this were just a chance to wander round the Botanical Gardens at night, that’d almost be enough, but this is more, much more…
There’s a row of tall and proud customised standard lamps for a start; a great glass mansion full of lily ponds and weeping willows hung with distressed dresses; a forest of illuminated His Master’s Voice gramophones whizzing and whirring; kinetic flowers spinning amongst the foliage; a tree full of electronic fireflies, a courtyard full of flares and flamelights. There’s the sound of Tibetan bowls singing (set in motion by vibrating mobile phones), and of electronic insects humming; the whisper of cracked and warped old records, the clicking of a thousand cricket legs.
The glasshouses (turns out there’s not one or two but four or more I seem to remember, although it is easy to get disorientated), plus the space in-between, around and outside of them, have been used as a canvas (though not of course a blank canvas) by a group of artists that includes environmental sound installation artist Jony Easterby, Mark Anderson of The Photophonic Experiment fame, and legendary performance artist and founder member of the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, Ann Bean.
I wish I could have made more trips to Power Plant, there was so much to see and hear and smell and feel. A beautiful site-responsive piece; a magical journey into the undergrowth of the psyche.
Dorothy Max Prior
Andrea Cusumano
The Bitter Belief of Cotrone the Magician
Sweet in the Firth of Forth
We pack ourselves onto a bus – a journey out of Edinburgh is an exciting one. Half an hour later we arrive at a tourist ferry and another half an hour journey transports us across the water to the ‘mysterious island’ of Inchcombe – home to a beautiful 12th Century Abbey, and the setting for Andrea Cusumano’s strange and often bewildering performance, which takes its inspiration from Pirandello’s unfinished play The Mountain Giants.
Seated on bales of hay, a grey-haired Cotrone emerges from within the old walls of the Abbey accompanied by a long-limbed puppet dangling from beneath his cloak. In English and Italian he tells us that he can conjure anything he so wishes. A royal procession circles the audience, with a Japanese queen arriving centre stage to lament the loss of her love. Slowly, a plethora of disturbing misfits arrive from the cracks in the walls, and with them, any narrative seems to disappear.
The macabre characters (beautifully costumed) wander around, hanging dripping puppets on washing lines, arguing wordlessly with each other and bowing down to Cotrone’s wishes. It’s an eerie world where all is not right, with the live band’s eclectic and disparate sound effects adding to the atmosphere already created by the constant squawking of the seagulls which circle the island. It’s more performance art than theatre, and the setting is suitably impressive. However, it was far too easy to forget the experience on the ferry journey back to land.
Terry O’Donovan
Badac
The Devoured
Pleasance Over the Road
Badac continue to develop a ‘theatre of violence’ with The Devoured, a one-man show by Steve Lambert about the Holocaust (their controversial site-responsive piece The Factory, also about the Holocaust, was presented at the Pleasance Undergrand for Fringe 2008).
The Devoured is physical from the start. A man is running, panting, chanting ‘run for the beast’. He has almost no time to catch his breath, which becomes painful to watch. Gestures are repeated many times. The speech patterns are also rhythmic and relentless. Participles such as ‘laughing’ and ‘screaming’ show the action in progress and ram the point home.
The material is in some ways sadly familiar. The narrative follows the history of yellow stars, invasion, eviction, forced labour, the ghetto and extermination camps, so there is no doubting what is next. However, this is given an aggressive, personal edge. The result is the opposite of still images in textbooks, memorials and dignified accounts by survivors. Instead, it is raw and angry.
There are risks and ethical questions involved. It annoys me when Steve Lambert doesn’t take a bow at the end. Is this meant to imply that the material transcends theatrical convention, while using theatre so heavily?
The Devoured has impact, but it is also over-the-top and manipulative. However, the performance is sustained, so there are no embarrassing lapses. It does not seem formally new. Reading the company’s website afterwards, I am reminded of Steven Berkoff playing a frustrated, struggling man on a treadmill in the mid-1990s, in a monologue called Actor. Charlotte Smith
Rich Rusk in Association with Gomito Productions
The Lamplighters Lament
Bedlam Theatre
Three performers (and one puppet) converge to play the lamplighter in this wordless – apart from a charming introduction – tale of loss and acceptance. Director Rich Rusk has a pedigree (Gomito, Gecko) that shows in his work. Some of the visual imagery is delightful; the puppetry is integral to the performance; simple but effective physical techniques are used to enhance the tale; and the roaring soundtrack helps to create atmosphere and give a real sense of place.
The lighting for this show is what sets it apart. The lamplighters have tiny bulbs attached to their thumbs which they use to ‘throw’ lights into the air, across the space and at each other with the grace of magicians. Down-lighting zones the space, hides actors when they are working on the puppets and creates the look of street lamps along a long forgotten pier. An underwater grave is beautifully suggested with a plastic bag and a few LEDs. Rusk has created a richly textured visual landscape that tells the story without ever becoming showy.
This work is at an early stage of development, and a couple of times my mind wandered because the story lacked pace or I momentarily lost the thread. I never did figure out if the girl puppet was a daughter or love interest.
There’s honing to be done but as it stands, the show is intimate, deliberately slow, carefully crafted and well structured.
Wendy Windle
David Hughes Dance/Al Seed
The Red Room
Traverse Theatre
Pestilence, lunacy, sexual excess, hysteria… it’s all here, served up with grotesque glee and playfulness. The Red Room is an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – a popular text amongst visual theatre makers (Punchdrunk and Paper Cinema being two other recent Red Death interpreters). This one’s a dance-theatre piece directed by a physical theatre performer/director (Al Seed); a beautiful burlesque romp with – as you’d expect from Seed – strong elements of dark clown or Bouffon. Carefully crafted, expertly performed, The Red Room (after Poe) explores typical Gothic concerns: the battle between reason and emotion; the struggle of the individual versus the needs of the collective; the lure of the dangerous ‘outsider’; the fear of the invasion of the body.
It’s certainly a ‘total’ visual theatre experience: there are stunning lighting shifts (electric emerald, lurid lime, vivid violet) as we skip merrily through the colour-coded rooms in the doomed castle of the story, towards our final razor red destination; gorgeous white-on-white costume/mask design, with some interesting peripheral puppetry (cloth horses emerging from swathes of skirts); and entertaining performances from a team of dancers collected up from many disciplines (ballet, hip hop, contemporary, capoeira) who meet the physical theatre sensibility of Al Seed’s direction full-on – for example, when a courtly gavotte breaks into a chaotic clown fight.
As an added bonus, for the run at the Traverse Al Seed was performing in the show – and although this was a last-minute deputising for a dancer on compassionate leave, it is actually hard to imagine how the piece might be without his distinctive physical presence.
Dorothy Max Prior
Rotozaza
Wondermart
Forest Café/Forest Fringe
It was with giggly trepidation that I set off for the Tesco on Nicholson Street , Edinburgh with an MP3 player and some loose instructions from the Forest Fringe. My nervousness was caused in part by the strict command that if I was asked to leave by the supermarket staff I should do so without resistance and otherwise by a genuine fear of the unknown. Yes, the unknown. This was a very good start.
Standing outside the supermarket I pressed ‘play’ and was greeted by a soothingly hypnotic female voice teasing my senses with some general knowledge about supermarkets. Feeling in safe hands I stepped inside to begin a delightful new interaction with once familiar surroundings. I tailed a fellow shopper, went on a polar expedition – brilliantly supported by an arctic soundscape – to the back of the freezer section, contemplated shoplifting and marvelled at the science of product placement. The new product was exactly where honey-voiced lady said it would be: supermarket magic!
This unassuming little piece outweighs the sum of its parts and has stayed with me: especially as I tour around my local supermarket with a new awareness of the part I am playing in the theatre of shopping. I’ll play your game, Waitrose, but I know what you’re up to now.
In Wondermart I was fully and joyfully engaged so it is a compliment of sorts that I desperately wanted more. I’m hoping for Wondermart II: Daredevils Edition. Bring it on, Rotozaza – I can take it.
Wendy Windle
Kati Francis
Wrecked (A Guardian Reader’s Quest to Save Africa )
Edinburgh Sleep Centre
Penned and performed by Kati Francis, this one-woman show raises many interesting questions about cultural and personal heritage; about why we travel; and about where we belong and our rights to live where we want. Francis throws herself into the role with energy, enthusiasm and a great deal of volume, but I simply wasn’t moved: emotionally or intellectually. Francis covers such a wide range of issues and a bewildering cast of characters that we are often not sure who we are listening to or why. Characters are hastily drawn rather than inhabited, and a cohesive physical style is sorely lacking: Francis mimes a costume change in one scene only to actually pull her knickers down to pee (but not really do so) in another.
The fourth wall is broken then rebuilt only in the performer’s mind – the audience are left uncertain whether we are there or not. I was handed a beach ball and asked to ‘do something’ with it. So I blew it up then sat with it in my lap for the rest of the show unacknowledged. I felt like someone somewhere had a list: audience participation? Check!
Direction is the problem: Kati Francis is an engaging performer with a lot to say, and there is material for a decent show here, but it needs to be refined and taken to a higher dramaturgical standard. Francis is not without talent but needs stronger direction and to hone her physical characterisation skills. I sincerely hope this piece gets reworked as it could be relevant and thought-provoking and, who knows, perhaps even moving.
Wendy Windle
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