Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars
Two men stand peering at a large white screen made of paper. It is as if they are looking out on to some idyll-like landscape or a futuristic city that remains invisible to anyone without vision enough to build it. A printer at the side of the stage spews out sheets of paper with words on it that act as silent dialogue. Once the men move the screen to one side, a group of small tree trunk sized logs and some wooden pallets are revealed. For the next half hour, each man takes an axe to a log apiece and chops and chops and chopsuntil they splinter and break.
This audacious and compelling spectacle of hard graft sees the performers build up a percussive momentum that at times recalls the pounding rhythms of 1980s industrial music relocated to a forest. What happens over the next hour beyond their mini display of physical strength, however, is a remarkable study in renewal, recycling and transformation through a mix of imagination and practical building skills that turns best laid plans upside down.
It isn’t always easy to see the wood for the trees in a show created by director Andrejs Jarovojs, designer Rudolf Bekičand the cast of Rūdolfs Gediņš and Edgars Samītis forthe Riga based Latvian company, Ģertrūdes ielas teātris (Theatre on Gertrude Street). Presented here as part of the Manipulate festival, the bravura display on show nevertheless morphs into a series of elaborate riffs on how natural materials are essential, be it in everyday construction or in the use of paper for the screen and the sheets printed out that show off the next stage of a tree’s life cycle.
As Gediņš and Samītis become ever more playful while they interact with the wood, it shows off too the basic impetus to create in a way that reflects the environmental interventions of artists such as Andy Goldsworthy and the shamanic actions of the late Joseph Beuys. Here, however, things fly in an infinitely more absurdist fashion in a show that boxes clever in every way.
The Herald, February 11th 2026
ends
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