Skip to main content

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018 Theatre Reviews 2 - Huff - CanadaHub @ King's Hall, Four Stars / Ulster American, Traverse Theatre, Four Stars

Huff begins with a suicide attempt. This sets the tone for Cliff Cardinal’s fearless solo look at the underbelly of Canada’s indigenous community. What emerges through Cardinal’s dynamic and discomforting tale of three brothers is a picture of disenfranchisement, brutalisation, inter-familial abuse and collective dysfunction. This is told through the voice of Wind and his kid brother Huff, feral little punks getting high on anything they can.

Cardinal is a human whirlwind throughout Karin Randoja’s production, originally presented by Native Earth Performing Arts and co-produced here by Cunning Concepts and Creations as part of Summerhall’s CanadaHub strand. Beyond geographical specifics, there is a recognisable universality at play. This is what happens to marginalised communities the world over. When Wind decides to live, it’s the first messy step in recognising that it doesn’t have to be that way.

In Ulster American, Hollywood A-lister Jay and right-on London Theatre director Leigh meet to discuss the forthcoming production of Ruth’s new play. As they freeform ideas dominated by Jay’s largesse, boundaries are crossed in recognisably troubling ways. When Ruth arrives, things take an even more problematic turn in an increasingly frenetic debate on cultural identity that stems from a mixture of ignorance, sentiment and blind loyalty.

David Ireland’s explosive new work ruthlessly exposes a world that likes to think itself edgy, when in fact it rarely goes beyond a wet liberal consensus. The extreme farce that erupts is an unflinching assault on political presumption, in-grained ambition and desperate careerists willing to kiss the orifice that allows them to scramble their way to the top.

The trio are played with turbo-charged abandon in Gareth Nicholls’ Traverse company production by Darrell D’Silva as Jay, Robert Jack as Leigh and Lucianne McEvoy as Ruth. The play’s punchline might not be subtle, but it is necessarily deadly in its execution.

 The Herald, August 9th 2018

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art School Dance Goes On Forever – Snapshots Of Masters Of The Multiverse

Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School

1

In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.

This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.

The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.

The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
Post a Comment
Read more

Peter Brook – The Prisoner

Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata, to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990 had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival.
Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow.
Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residency has alr…
Post a Comment
Read more

Martin McCormick – Ma, Pa and the Little Mouths

Family life is everything to Martin McCormick. The actor turned writer is having an increasingly high profile as a playwright, with his biggest play to date, Ma, Pa and the Little Mouths, opening this week at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in a production in association with the National Theatre of Scotland as part of the Tron’s Mayfesto season. While his own domestic life with his wife, actress Kirsty Stuart, who is currently appearing in Frances Poet’s play, Gut, at the Traverse in Edinburgh, and their two children, sounds a hectic whirl of of juggling schedules, it is nothing like the world he has created for his play.
“I always knew it was going to be about two older people who’d experienced some kind of trauma and grief,” says McCormick, “but whatever it is that they’ve been through, it’s all in the background. They’re suppressing it, and there’s all this claustrophobia caused by all these suppressed emotions they’re going through while being stuck in this room. I guess all that came…
Post a Comment
Read more