Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars Two bespectacled men in identical suits and patterned maroon sweaters step onto a wooden floor empty save for a pair of matching chairs with a bottle of water beside each. Standing alongside each other, the two men open the brown paper covered notebooks each are carrying, and, in unison, announce each chapter of their back pages. What follows in Forced Entertainment's interpretation of Hungarian writer Agota Kristof's novel concerning twin boys' experiences while evacuated to their grand-mother's farm during World War Two and beyond is a fascinatingly grotesque look at the brutal extremes survival can take. As performers Robin Arthur and Richard Lowden read their first-person narrative as if unveiling their joint diaries at a spoken-word night, it's as if Gilbert and George had channelled John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos and married such an unholy alliance to a bombed-out equivalent of Ivor Cutler's Life in A Scotch Sitt
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.