Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
All life is
here from the moment this suitably community rendering of Peter Handke’s epic
of everyday human behaviour opens with the slow reveal of scurrying feet. The
bodies they belong to dart this way and that, criss-crossing lives in motion in
a hurry to get somewhere else.
With a cast of
more than ninety volunteer performers, Wils Wilson and Janice Parker’s
production of Meredith Oakes’ translation of a play made up of 46 pages of
stage directions is a necessarily busy affair. Over almost ninety minutes –
time is an elastic concept here -
more than 400
passers-by have their moment on the town square catwalk with a multitude of
blink-and-you’ll-miss-them entrances and exits. Some are inconsequential, some more
fantastical, as a million little stories are caught in flight. Beyond the
levity, there are hints of more invasive anxieties, so the sound of what could
be either gunshots or fireworks accompanies images of incarceration that allow
the audience to imagine the worst.
This is
people-watching in extremis, the visual equivalent of eavesdropping and making
presumptions based on a sliver of a story. Seemingly ordinary lives take mental
back-flips into fantasy realms in a way that at times is akin to Mr Benn
stepping into Westworld by way of last night’s prime time news. In this sense
Wilson and Parker’s rendering of Handke’s play is as much a glimpse into the
collective unconscious as the outer world it drifts through using a
cartoon-like array of possibilities.
The whole
thing is driven by Michael John McCarthy’s score, a jaunty mix of palm court
strings and baroque chamber jazz that colours in the show’s light and shade. As
people go on no matter what, the whole becomes a life-affirming sketchbook of
how we live now, tomorrow and the day after.
The Herald, June 4th 2018
Ends
Comments