Theatre Uncut in Edinburgh

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Against a backdrop of crisis, cuts, turmoil and disillusionment, theatre seems to be reclaiming its place as an art form at the heart of popular protest. Only a few days after the widely attacked sentencing of Russian punk band Pussy Riot, a verdict whose announcement was marked by a day of protest across the world – including an event at the Royal Court Theatre – an embryonic glimpse of this year’s new international incarnation of Theatre Uncut is seen at the Traverse Theatre. It is the sort of protest that feels rough, messy, alive.

The series of short play readings, a taste of what to expect from the full autumn event, takes place not in the auditorium but in the theatre’s bar. We are told that this is to demonstrate that these plays can be performed anywhere; the hope is that this November they will be given life by hundreds of people in village halls and cafes, pubs and community centres. Beyond this straightforward aim, the bar feels like an open, sociable space, a space where audience and performers are not divided by an invisible barrier but where we are able to feel like simply one group of people gathered together with a common interest.

Extending this united messiness, none of the work that is presented is in anything near a finished state. Everyone’s time is given free to Theatre Uncut, meaning that actors assembled from across the festival have had only one hour in which to rehearse and still clutch scripts in their hands. There is something appealingly untidy about it, lending the event a fitting air of urgency. A more slick and polished product would take something from the importance of its message; here the potency lies entirely with the writing.

The pieces that are showcased at the morning event all take differing approaches to the political stimuli, a recognition of the multiplicity of voices and perspectives to which Theatre Uncut is responding. Anders Lustgarten’s The Break Out is succinctly metaphorical. A scene between two women given the chance to escape a benign prison and offered a choice between being “comfortably miserable or scarily free”, it confronts our apathy-inducing state of comfort and the illusion of freedom that can be so easily cast.

Meanwhile Blondie, written by Royal Court Young Writers’ Programme graduate Hayley Squires and absolutely nothing to do with Debbie Harry, takes the dystopian route. Playing with the cult of personality that has dominated politics in recent years, reaching its apex with Blair’s brand of “Cool Britannia”, Squires paints a portrait of a leader elected on pure, blonde-haired appeal. The brutal lesson that this leader then teaches the country – to “get a grip” – is lacking in subtlety, but lands a few painful punches on our greedy, fiercely consumerist lack of perspective. Dire as the situation here may seem, Squires reminds us, it is much worse elsewhere.

The most striking piece of the morning, however, is Clara Brennan’s Spine. Heartbreakingly performed by Rosie Wyatt, it tells the tender story of an unlikely friendship between a frail old woman and a teenage girl, while also writing something of a love letter to our dying libraries. It is a delicately multi-layered monologue, touching upon the deep and damaging cuts, the concept of political power and the idea that there is “nothing more terrifying than a teenager with something to say”, but its primary cry is one for compassion. Politics has forgotten people, something that this deeply moving piece does not allow us to do for a moment.

The morning is closed by two pieces even more ad hoc than the rest. In recognition of the Pussy Riot trial that has provoked so much protest around the world, and as a sort of epilogue to the event at the Royal Court at which the defendants’ testimonies were read, three actresses pull on balaclavas while we listen to the sentencing of Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alekhina and Yekaterina Samutsevich. This is then followed by a rapid response piece by David Greig, written over a matter of days and inspired by recent news. This move towards immediacy is one which helps to solidify the ideas that have been floating shapelessly around the room, firmly reminding us that this is an event connected to and speaking out against very real problems.

But there is also an awareness that this is not enough. Sitting in a room listening to and talking about political issues is not quite action in itself. As Marco Canale’s candid monologueThe Birth of My Violence recognises, putting pen to paper instead of placard can be interpreted as an act of cowardice, an evasion of genuine action in favour of weak intellectualising, and perhaps it is.

What Theatre Uncut lacks in this current presentation is what makes it what it is: the element of mass protest. Performed in a closed space to a few dozen gathered people, these pieces can feel like cursory gestures. But when taken ownership of by people all over the country in a unified raising of voices, these short plays have the power to be much, much more.

Bottleneck, Pleasance Courtyard

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Greg is almost fifteen, almost a man. For him, manhood means a moustache and a swagger; it means John McClane in Die Hard, not taking shit from anyone. It’s nearly his birthday, and despite a lack of cash and the best efforts of his dad, he’s going to find a way to watch the Liverpool match. The world, full of girls and footie and best mates, is out there waiting for him. But sometimes the experiences that really mark the transition from youth to adulthood are also the experiences that scar for life.

Luke Barnes’ latest play is packaged as coming-of-age tale, but unwraps into something far more devastating and complex. The writing is nuanced and intelligent enough to keep its devices hidden and its direction obscured, until the destination suddenly appears on the horizon with gut-ripping inevitability. Without undoing that nuance, it is enough to say that its shattering denouement treads familiar ground, walking along a recognisable narrative with unblinking new insight. In its careful use of history, the piece can rely on the structure of the audience’s collective knowledge to hold its fragments together, while simultaneously smashing that scaffold apart.

Unlike other pieces that insist on reopening old wounds, Bottleneck feels urgent, fresh, full of rage. This is partly down to Barnes’ razor-sharp writing and partly down to a blistering performance from James Cooney, whose every coiled muscle seems to hum with barely controlled aggression. He is constantly hopping from leg to leg, never still, channelling the nimble footwork of Greg’s red-shirted heroes. Resisting any idea of the solo show as static, Steven Atkinson’s direction is ever moving, ever generating and radiating energy.

In this production’s appropriately bare presentation, the monologue is played out in an empty performance space below two glaring floodlights, which alternately flicker, die and burst blindingly into life. As well as effectively conjuring the space of the sport with which Greg so closely identifies, the stark quality of this lighting has the effect of the laboratory microscope, an unforgiving illumination under which this tortured specimen struggles and squirms.

As microscopic as Barnes’ focus appears, however, this muscular piece is not limited in its ambition to the singular narrative of its protagonist. Greg, as intensely drawn as he is, emerges as just one symptom of a wider problem. As youthful optimism becomes steadily jaded, the creaking escalator of social mobility shudders to a halt and Greg’s story becomes yet another instance of a life being determined by the inescapability of birth. If you come from the wrong place, this furious snarl of a play argues, then you’re fucked.

Photo: Bill Knight

A Strange Wild Song, Bedlam Theatre

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

Songs of war provide the background score for this latest addition to Edinburgh’s ever-growing Lecoq contingent, devised by emerging physical theatre company Rhum and Clay. In a piece that delicately shifts between modern day Britain and the bomb-ravaged landscape of France during the Second World War, a man is transported back to the past through the medium of a single roll of film recovered from his grandfather’s wartime camera. What it reveals is an extraordinary and unlikely encounter between the soldier and a trio of abandoned young brothers.

Warfare, dream and play are all intermingled in the scenes between the soldier and the three boys, in which a lost boy aesthetic is thrown like a grenade into the heart of the battlefield. Taking refuge from the horrors of battle, there is a creeping sense of regression into the innocence and imagination of childhood, enhanced visually by the playing of the children by three adult actors. Avoiding many of the hackneyed techniques that often plague dramatic portrayals of children, the performers fully inhabit these young roles with all the clumsy physicality and uninhibited charm of childhood.

For all this charm, however, the piece as a whole feels oddly, uncomfortably exploitative, using the drama lent by atrocity in order to create something indulgently beautiful. The choice of subject matter certainly enables some stunning moments of creativity; in the process of gameplay, a ramshackle aeroplane stutters through the air, given movement purely by the impressively controlled bodies of the performers, while in another beautiful moment a red balloon floats above the rubble, appearing seemingly from nowhere.

But where this gorgeously assembled style soars, it leaves its half-baked plot with its feet fixed firmly to the ground. Ideas about memory, war, childhood and imagination lie scattered like shrapnel, casualties of the painstakingly crafted aesthetic. More than a matter of style over substance, Rhum and Clay’s creation is naggingly problematic due to the very particular historic make-up of the substance it fails to fully engage with.

Clothed in all the now clichéd trappings of Lecoq-inspired theatre that seem to abound at the fringe – physically controlled clowning, inventive use of props, the seemingly obligatory accordion – this all feels a little twee for the environs of war-torn France. Of this spreading rash of physical theatre, Rhum and Clay prove themselves to be among the best, demonstrating exciting potential, but they are in need of a better vehicle for their ingenious visual style. Whimsy and war do not make comfortable bedfellows.

The Shit / La Merda, Summerhall

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

In the absence of adequate words that it leaves in its wake, it is tempting to characterise Cristian Ceresoli’s searing collection of monologues as one long, piercing scream. Such a description certainly captures the raw, bruising intensity of the piece, an intensity that rips the breath from your lungs. But it also ignores the open tenderness of that same wound, a wound that is scabbed over and viciously picked at in a relentless yet compelling cycle. In Ceresoli’s creation, pain is a constant presence.

The pain we experience is that of an unnamed woman, perched high on a platform in the centre of Summerhall’s gloomy Demonstration Room. As played by the astounding Silvia Gallerano, she is naked in every possible sense of the word, bare save for a slick of blood red lipstick. Microphone clutched in hand and limbs protectively folded, she speaks with startling directness, nothing to separate or shield her performance from the audience other than the few metres of air in between.

Ceresoli’s equally naked writing has the quality of a symphony, teasing out recurring patterns of notes. The speaker is obsessed by her thighs, by the false idol of fame, by her painfully terminated relationship with her father. Repeated words puncture the text: courage, sacrifice, alone, self. It is a boldly honest exploration of the values we attach to our identity and the ways in which we define ourselves, be that against our family, our nation or the cruel expectations of the media.

In interrogating notions of identity, the piece becomes a fascinating study of what it means to be a woman, as well as what it means to be this specific woman. Although written by a man, this is intensely about female selfhood in a way that is not reductive or – that awful criticism of writing by or concerning women – domestic, but simply, honestly, starkly truthful. No thought is taboo, no impulse censored or diluted. It is the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf married with the spitting rage of punk.

Despite the conspicuous lack of stagecraft – all that ever appears in the womb-like space is platform, performer and microphone, simply lit by spotlights – this is as theatrical a piece as is likely to be found at the fringe this year. It is overwhelming proof of the power of the performer, Gallerano holding the audience immovably rapt by her open, direct address, every last muscle seeming to move with the text. Brittle yet achingly vulnerable, her voice has the slightest wavering hint of a tremor even when she cracks jokes, before releasing astonishing intensity when an acknowledgement of selfhood is finally ripped out with convulsing screams: “Me! Me! Me!”

Consumption – and, as the title would suggest, excretion – are at the pulsating heart of the piece. Eating here is a method of control, of sacrifice. Like the octopus at the aquarium that her father tells her can eat its own tentacles, the speaker describes a hunger-crazed fantasy of eating her fingers, an act that she is convinced would usher in the fame she so desperately craves. It is as though by eating her own flesh, absorbing and thus hiding a part of herself, she can transform herself into a tastier morsel for the greedily consuming public. It is, like the piece as a whole, a deeply unsettling comment on society, the female experience and the construction of identity.

One Hour Only, Underbelly

Posted on by Catherine Love-Smith

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Originally written for IdeasTap.

AJ’s mates have bought him a banging present for his 21st birthday – quite literally.

Out of place in a classy London brothel, the gift he ends up with is Marly, a cash-strapped student in her first night on the job, with whom he has more in common than he expected.

This is the somewhat contrived but dramatically fruitful set-up of Sabrina Mahfouz’s new play, a bite-sized meditation on youth, sexual politics and the economics of power. As soon as Marly’s mask slips and it becomes clear that this will be no usual encounter between prostitute and client, the unlikely situation becomes a platform for surprisingly honest discussion and debate between the pair. They might remain clothed, but the conversation is naked.

Marly, who likes sex but likes money more, argues her defence by suggesting that no exchange involving money is ever truly empowering; we are all, to a lesser or greater extent, whoring out our talents. Falling prey to Pretty Woman syndrome, AJ tries to talk Marly out of her morally dubious profession, but Mahfouz’s writing is too clever to allow this to become anything nearing black and white.

Through AJ and Marly, the piece asks questions about ambition, money, knowledge, the nature of modern feminism. There is also an acute observation about the way in which sex is viewed in modern Britain, with the line between casual one-night stands and paid-for encounters growing ever more blurred.

AJ and Marly’s conversational dance, engagingly played by Faraz Ayub and Nadia Clifford, takes place in a naturalistic, clinical hotel room, a naturalism that is offset by a striking back wall of lightbulbs in Francesca Reidy’s design. This simple yet fascinating feature fades and brightens, pulsing with the power games between man and woman, crackling like their obvious chemistry. Although Mahfouz’s intriguing, intelligent piece has yet to quite reach its own lightbulb moment, as the hour ticks past it leaves everyone wanting a few more minutes.

Photo: Jassy Earl