Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
4stars
Love, death and everything inbetween fire this inspired double bill by
director Ramin Gray's invigorated ATC company, who tour Sarah Kane's
free-associative meditation on the painful highs and lows of an
obsessive and possibly self-destructive amour to the theatre it was
first seen in 1998. That was in a production by future National Theatre
of Scotland director Vicky Featherstone. Played fourteen years on in
tandem with Cazimir Liske's translation of Russian writer Ivan
Viripaev's equally serious dissection of how romance can be the
greatest of deceivers, the plays are fascinatingly revealed as mutual
flipsides of the same coin.
The same four actors line up side by side in each to lay bare things
that are more often left unsaid. In Crave, they stand on a platform in
pyjamas and nighties, as if what comes out of their mouths over the
next forty minutes is some kind of bedtime nightmare. In Illusions,
they sit on chairs to tell the story of two elderly couples who, after
half a century of marriage, discover things aren't quite what they
seem. While the narrative is seemingly lighter and more straightforward
in Viripaev's piece, there's a playfulness to both, with Crave peppered
with bleakly funny one-liners beyond it's more over-wrought leanings,
that look both to Beckett and to R.D. Laing's poetry.
There's an unflinching intimacy to both works, which are delivered with
few frills but bags of nuanced warmth and passion by a cast featuring
Liske himself alongside Derbhle Crotty, Rona Morison and Jack Tarlton.
It may not all be easy listening, but in terms of poetic insights into
what makes our inner lives tick, it's profound, beautiful and
terrifying.
The Herald, May 29th 2012
ends
Comments