MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling
Four stars
In small town life, everybody knows your business.
More importantly perhaps, they also know your name. So it goes in the rural 16th
century French community that occupies Ellie Stewart’s dark and elegant mystery
as it investigates the existential human consequences of stepping into someone
else’s shoes. The cuckoo in the nest here is Arnaud, Thoren Ferguson’s rugged
stranger who fills an absence left by the disappearance of Bertrande’s husband
when he wandered off into the hills seven years before. Never, Bertrande
presumes, to be seen again. Until now, that is. Like Arnaud says, he’s returned
a new man.
Drawn from various takes on the real-life story of
Martin Guerre, Stewart has constructed a dramatic smoke-screen of beguiling beauty
and shadowy erotics. Philip Howard’s touring production for the Inverness-based
Eden Court Theatre wraps this in a slow-burning musicality pulsed by brooding
cello drones created live by Greg Sinclair, who also plays Arnaud’s son, Sanxi.
As Kenneth MacLeod’s rough-hewn set seems to conjure up an entire landscape in
miniature, Emilie Patry gives Bertrande a pragmatic earthiness to match.
All of this is driven by the stark boldness of the
writing. There’s a richness to Stewart’s stripped-back dialogue that’s awash
with terminally guarded exchanges that constantly threaten to spill its secrets
out into the open for all the village to see. In the end, it’s as if Arnaud
wants to get found out as he sabotages himself as much as the comfort-zone of
the domestic bliss he’s built around him. If he’s taken his reinvented self as
far as he can go, the second-hand family Arnaud leaves behind will find stories
of their own as they work out what they’re willing to believe to fill the void.
The Herald, February 26th 2018
ends
Comments