Traverse Theatre @ Stills Gallery, Edinburgh
Mapping out one’s life is a complex business. Where sometimes the hubbub of the urban fast-track carries you along on its rollercoaster rhythm, at others, the only way to get back to basic principles is to duck out, take stock and get your head together in the country. So it is in Nicholas Bone’s micro-condensed adaptation of Henry David Thoreau’s meditation of a life lived in temporary solitude in a woodland cabin in19th century Massachusetts.
As performed by Ewan Donald in the bright, white space of Stills Gallery in Bone’s own production for his ever enquiring Magnetic North company, there’s something gently beguiling at play here. Much of this comes from Donald’s laidback first person narration, which at times can’t help but resemble a voice-over from an episode of The Waltons. But beyond the stark simplicity of a floor full of sand, there’s a lot more going on.
The design team of Sans facon take full advantage of the gallery space, etching onto the walls Thoreau’s forensically exact lists of exactly what it costs to live at the purest level. Elsewhere, metaphors of flowing rivers and sands of time are in abundance. As befits a work that’s about emptying out one’s personal space, though, none of this is over-egged. What’s revealed is not only a pre-Beat classic that sets the tone for the future outback adventures of Jack London and, more pertinently perhaps, Jack Kerouac’s own Zenned-out back-woods meditation, Big Sur. Rather, Thoreau’s entire New Age philosophy is eked out and delivered via season to season first person ruminations that never sound cranky, but offer a righteous and humble poetry of the soul.
February 4th 2008
ends
Mapping out one’s life is a complex business. Where sometimes the hubbub of the urban fast-track carries you along on its rollercoaster rhythm, at others, the only way to get back to basic principles is to duck out, take stock and get your head together in the country. So it is in Nicholas Bone’s micro-condensed adaptation of Henry David Thoreau’s meditation of a life lived in temporary solitude in a woodland cabin in19th century Massachusetts.
As performed by Ewan Donald in the bright, white space of Stills Gallery in Bone’s own production for his ever enquiring Magnetic North company, there’s something gently beguiling at play here. Much of this comes from Donald’s laidback first person narration, which at times can’t help but resemble a voice-over from an episode of The Waltons. But beyond the stark simplicity of a floor full of sand, there’s a lot more going on.
The design team of Sans facon take full advantage of the gallery space, etching onto the walls Thoreau’s forensically exact lists of exactly what it costs to live at the purest level. Elsewhere, metaphors of flowing rivers and sands of time are in abundance. As befits a work that’s about emptying out one’s personal space, though, none of this is over-egged. What’s revealed is not only a pre-Beat classic that sets the tone for the future outback adventures of Jack London and, more pertinently perhaps, Jack Kerouac’s own Zenned-out back-woods meditation, Big Sur. Rather, Thoreau’s entire New Age philosophy is eked out and delivered via season to season first person ruminations that never sound cranky, but offer a righteous and humble poetry of the soul.
February 4th 2008
ends
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