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
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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