Lowland Hall, Royal Highland Centre 5 stars Before Theatre du Soleil’s four hour epic on life, death, revolution and the creative impulse itself has even begun, you’ve already entered into another world via a foyer transformed into an illusory idyll. With the company’s vast ensemble cast visible through a gauze curtain preparing themselves in makeshift dressing rooms, such an occupation sets the tone for an astonishing spectacle on a huge purpose-built wooden stage that recreates that contained in the company’s Paris home. What translates as Castaways of the Fol Espoir (Sunrises) is ostensibly based on a posthumously published Jules Verne novel, in which a pair of Socialist idealists attempt to make a film on no money as the First World War’s early rumblings begin to stir. Director Ariane Mnouchkine, writer Helene Cixous and an army of collaborators have created something so exquisitely self-reflexive that it goes some way to capturing the spirit and wisdom of Theatre du Soleil’s own utopian roots. With the would-be auteurs equally ambitious movie told in nine increasingly urgent episodes watched over by primitive hand-held cameras that distance us from the action, the voyage the Fol Espoir becomes a microcosm of doomed humanity. There is a sensational fluidity to the stream of stage pictures, conjured up with little more than a few blankets and a few painted stage-flats that show off the full artifice of such a fictional folly. After early bursts of on-set knockabout antics, by the second half the film-set has become a little republic, and the piece’s full-blown profundity has become clear in a vivid and unmissable portrait of humanity’s capacity for invention against all the odds. The Herald, August 24th 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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