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 q
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.