Fruitmarket Warehouse, Edinburgh
Four Stars
Take a sad song and make it better. This is the premise behind Magnetic North Theatre Company’s hour-long meditation on how pop ditties can end up becoming the soundtrack of your life, infused with new meaning alongside every heartache, betrayal and everyday epiphany they accompany. As Noel Coward observed with such throwaway profundity, strange how potent cheap music is.
Directors Nicholas Bone and Marisa Zanotti take this idea and run with it in a moving and graceful mash-up of words, music and movement that draws from a range of sources. These include Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Rear Window, the short stories of Katherine Mansfield and the final scene of Anton Chekhov’s play, Uncle Vanya from which the show takes its title.
Five performers occupy a series of spaces set apart from each other in private isolation, where a collective sense of loss emerges in near ritualistic fashion. After a frantic rearranging of furniture that sees the quintet seemingly attempting to cast out the leftover demons of their past, things settle into a series of quietly desperate little snapshots of unrequited yearning.
This is punctuated by an original score by Daniel Padden, who plays and performs alongside Apphia Campbell, Greg Sinclair, Mia Scott and Bone. There are exquisite arrangements too of existing songs that become themes for each character. This range from All is Loneliness by street musician, Moondog, to classics by Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. Sinclair transforms the peppy skank of Orange Juice’s 1983 hit, Rip it Up, into a wracked string soaked ballad, before Campbell gives a devastating rendition of Etta James’ I’d Rather Go Blind.
All of which is perfect for the first theatrical production to be performed in the Fruitmarket Gallery’s Warehouse, a former nightclub space where many a love affair began and ended on the dance floor. As We Will Hear the Angels shows, it is the songs of strength and heartbreak that get you through the dark times.
The Herald, January 30th 2023
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