Skip to main content

The Sideshow

Out of the Blue, Edinburgh
Three stars

Gentrification of major cities around the world has arguably reached crisis point, with the rise of short term lets and developers attempting to bulldoze away local communities at a global premium. With such moves particularly visible in Edinburgh, writer Duncan Kidd and director Gavin Crichton’s piece of allegorical agit-prop looks at the very real consequences of what is happening right now on their Leith doorstep, a stone’s throw from Out of the Blue’s art space.

This collaboration between Active Inquiry and Strange Town theatre companies alongside the All or Nothing aerial dance company sets out its store in the mythical town of Omawick, where the circus visits every year, keeping the local economy afloat. When the circus attempts to buy up everything in sight for themselves, despite initial encouragement from the mayor and her yes men and women, the local townsfolk revolt, with the result being that the circus departs forever.

Inspired by Friedrich Durrenmatt’s play, The Visit, and devised with the show’s fifteen-strong acting ensemble, five aerialists and two musicians, it’s not hard to see parallels with real life events of late. Over sixty-five rollicking minutes, the audience move in and about a performance space centred around a statue of town founder Oma, here a ukulele-playing sprite played by Megan Travers. At points they become part of the action, which shifts between various set-pieces that focus on businesses under threat, absurdist speechifying and a couple of prodigals’ returns from locals who haven’t always made good.

It’s all wonderfully utopian stuff, with the good people of Omawick taking smiley-faced and rainbow-coloured control of their own destiny. As simplistic as it might sometimes appear, Crichton and Kidd’s construction is an expression of localism in its purest form. In terms of collective action, it is also a timely summing up of where we are now, and the people power required to provide a voice that is about more than just money talking.

The Herald, June 24th 2019

ends







Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more