Skip to main content

Edinburgh International Festival 2019 Theatre - La Reprise

Royal Lyceum Theatre
Four stars

Like Making of a Murderer or a Vice true crime documentary, Milo Rau’s explosive new creation looks you in the eye before putting the boot in. Taking the real life murder of a man outside a gay club in Liege as their starting point, European enfant terrible Rau and his International Institute of Political Murder company reconstruct events in forensic close up without ever trying to solve the crime. First up, however, we meet the six actors at an audition, with three of them testing in turn for the other three, filmed live as they’re asked how far they’ll go to keep things real.

Such a meta-narrative approach has been around even before Lindsay Anderson thumped Malcolm McDowell with a script at the end of Anderson’s 1970s state of the nation sprawl, O Lucky Man! Rau’s production is even more self-aware, styling his creation as Histoire(s) du Theatre (1). The mix of professional and non-professional actors never lose sight of their own artifice. Their straight to camera digressions come in-between scenes from an existential noir that suggests the car-load of boys about town are killing for kicks and want of something better to do than joy-riding with strangers. While this points to economic disenfranchisement for young people in humdrum towns, it never moralises.

Performed in French and Flemish as part of Edinburgh International Festival’s You Are Here strand, and told in chapters, Rau’s conception makes for a surprisingly funny if increasingly intense ride. Devised with the performers, scenes relayed onscreen in Maxime Jennes and Dimitri Petrovic’s video work are replicated in the flesh. The homicide itself is shown unadorned in painstakingly mundane detail. While one initially shudders when a real car is wheeled onstage, when things take an ugly turn, it feels like your nose is pressed up against the tightly wound window, almost complicit in the thrill of it all. As an introduction to Rau’s wilfully provocative line of inquiry, La Reprise is quite a gauntlet being thrown down.

The Herald, August 6th 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