Ferry Road, Edinburgh
4 stars
In a secret urban garden in the north of the city by night, the earth is
about to erupt into explosive life. The audience for this latest site
sensitive work by the Vision Mechanics company have already been
promenaded down the quiet street beyond from a local hotel, and are sat
around the moodily-lit shrubbery while what sounds like the low rumble
of cracking earth churns from the headphones each is given as they pass
through the gate.
In the crepescular glow, a folk lament is sung as smoke billows, until
the singing morphs into an unseen woman's voice calling to her lost
love. When the young woman finally enters, great-coated and alive with
possibility, it's as if she's risen from the ground itself, so at one
with the birds and bees twittering and buzzing in our ears does she
seem. For her, sex and love are something primal, obsessive and
unfettered, and only when her passions are thwarted and the life that
drives her is ripped out of her do things spill over into anger.
There's something mythic-sounding about Chris Lee's richly poetic text,
performed with an intense sense of abandon by Emma Anderson in Symon
Macintyre's production. The outdoor setting, given light and shade by
designer Charlie Macintyre, and Tam Treanor's seismic soundscape,
breathes life into the piece's dark eroticism. It's Anderson, however,
who gives the forty-minute monologue it's heart. As her character
lashes out, the full self-destructive fury of a woman scorned is laid
bare as she becomes a force of nature destined to haunt her garden of
earthly delights forever.
The Herald, March 5th 2013
ends
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