Kings Theatre 4 stars The women who whinny and canter like horses as the audience enter are a striking introduction to Romanian maestro Silviu Purcarete’s impressionistic interpretation of Jonathan Swift’s great satirical novel. It’s as if they’re higher beings on a catwalk, tantalisingly untouchable but irresistible too. The fact that this image of Swift’s Houyhnhnms is almost immediately upstaged by something even greater speaks volumes about Purcarete’s power to impress, even as the feral Yahoos – human beings in their basest form – move in en masse. Taking the fourth book of Swift’s epic as his starting point, Purcarete maps out an absurd nightmare portrait of man’s inhumanity to man through two figures bookending the ages. As an old man is carted off to an institution, his storybook left behind, a little boy rides in on a wooden horse to pick up the pages. With the child onstage throughout, it’s as if the series of extravagant tableaux and ensemble-based sketches that follow are extracted from his imagination. Babies are hammered to death and their innards served up as exotic delicacies. Giant rats scuttle about like a comic double-act. Bowler-hatted men in shadow attempt in vain to be bigger than they are. A puppet prostitute meets her match before she and her suitors depart with a miniature Can Can. Men in suits march in regimented unison like penguins before regressing into a primeval horde. With barely a word spoken onstage other than a recorded narration, such audacious stage-play is pulsed along by Shaun Davey’s vivid minimalist score. Awash with and melancholy in equal measure, as the boy and the old man’s voyage ends, there’s an acceptance of life’s ugliness, even as the possibilities beyond await. The Herald, August 18th 2012 ends
Edinburgh Playhouse Five stars A big National Coal Board sign looms large at the opening of Lee Hall and Elton John's decade-old musical stage version of Hall and director Stephen Daldry's hit turn of the century film. In a tale of one little boy's liberation as a dancer against the backdrop of the 1980s miners strike, however, the Durham Miners banner and the 'Save Our Community' sash held aloft matter more. It is this call to arms that forms the heart of Daldry's production, as Billy becomes a potty-mouthed beacon of hope in a situation where picket line, thin blue line and chorus line rub uneasily up against each other. Given such a context, there is bound to be some pretty grown-up stuff going on here, be it the institutionalised homophobia in Billy's village, the class war going on within it, or Billy's grieving for his dead mother that drives his every move. And, as so magnificently choreographed by Peter Darling, what moves they are. Watch...
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