Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh
Four
stars
Silence
isn’t always golden in Annie George and Flore Gardner’s multi-media meditation
on the power of finding one’s voice and standing up to those who would rather
shut women up. With writer and performer George and visual artist Gardner both
onstage throughout Saffy Setohy’s production, the pair join forces to reclaim
their stories in a way that gives them power and strength enough to transform
personal rites of passage into something greater.
While
George unravels her tale in a tumble of shared experience, Gardner doesn’t say
a word, preferring to let her pictures do the talking, both live and in
animated form. As her swirl of images form an evocative backdrop, they do more
than merely illustrate the story, but expand on it with an abstract urgency
that turns it into a visual invocation of contemporary legend.
This
becomes even more resonant as George and Gardner dovetail their own experiences
with the tale of Philomela, the mythological princess of Athens. In Ovid’s
telling of her story in Metamorphoses, Philomela has her tongue cut out after
being raped by Tereus, the king of Thrace. She is later transformed by the gods
into a nightingale, the female variety of which notably doesn’t sing.
Given
even greater depth by Niroshina Thambar’s score, which similarly melds the
ancient and modern, George and Gardner’s work becomes a brooding collage of
absorbed wisdom across the ages. There’s an everydayness to things too that
suggests what’s being laid bare is far more universal than is usually
acknowledged, usually for all the reasons the play points to. The end result
for George and Gardner – and for Philomela too come to that – is a
quasi-ritualistic form of purging that finds strength in numbers before it takes
flight.
The Herald, May 27th 2019
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