Coffee-Table Notes

Royal Lyceum Theatre Four stars A man enters a barren wilderness where he once went in search of something or someone. From the west, the man relays how he followed a lead, trying to fill in the gaps of a story about a man who committed a hideous crime, and who sat atop a hill for years staring at the prison walls beyond. So it goes at the start of Peter Brook and Marie-Helene Estienne’s extended meditation on justice, incarceration and liberation. Over seventy elliptical and surprisingly witty minutes, the young man at the play’s heart who left such a mark on the westerner is by turns banished, reviled and eventually accepted as a part of the landscape. Alone in the wilderness, the man holds court to resentful villagers and an increasingly amiable executioner as he wraps himself in psychological chains of his own making. Inspired by Brook’s real life encounter with a prisoner sitting in the open air in Afghanistan, this philosophical enquiry is as spare as any quest for

Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata, to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990 had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival. Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow. Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residenc

The Studio Four stars A disclaimer of sorts opens Pamela Carter’s loose-knit adaptation of French nouveau enfant terrible Édouard Louis’ autobiographical novel, which caused a sensation when it was published when Louis was just twenty-one. This is delivered by Alex Austin and Kwaku Mills, the two tracksuit-bottom and t-shirted young actors who tell young Eddy’s story as well as play all other parts by way of video footage on the four TV screens that line the front of the stage. This prologue sets out its store regarding what, exactly, the show’s young audiences will and won’t see over the next ninety minutes of Stewart Laing’s co-production between his Untitled Projects company and young people’s auteurs Unicorn Theatre. This is a neat and less discomforting way into Louis’ story, about how a small-town boy from a working-class background was brutalised for being different, only to take the leap into a world where he can be anyone he wants. On one level, Louis’ tale of rei