Kings Theatre 4 stars The women who whinny and canter like horses as the audience enter are a striking introduction to Romanian maestro Silviu Purcarete’s impressionistic interpretation of Jonathan Swift’s great satirical novel. It’s as if they’re higher beings on a catwalk, tantalisingly untouchable but irresistible too. The fact that this image of Swift’s Houyhnhnms is almost immediately upstaged by something even greater speaks volumes about Purcarete’s power to impress, even as the feral Yahoos – human beings in their basest form – move in en masse. Taking the fourth book of Swift’s epic as his starting point, Purcarete maps out an absurd nightmare portrait of man’s inhumanity to man through two figures bookending the ages. As an old man is carted off to an institution, his storybook left behind, a little boy rides in on a wooden horse to pick up the pages. With the child onstage throughout, it’s as if the series of extravagant tableaux and ensemble-based sketches that follow are extracted from his imagination. Babies are hammered to death and their innards served up as exotic delicacies. Giant rats scuttle about like a comic double-act. Bowler-hatted men in shadow attempt in vain to be bigger than they are. A puppet prostitute meets her match before she and her suitors depart with a miniature Can Can. Men in suits march in regimented unison like penguins before regressing into a primeval horde. With barely a word spoken onstage other than a recorded narration, such audacious stage-play is pulsed along by Shaun Davey’s vivid minimalist score. Awash with and melancholy in equal measure, as the boy and the old man’s voyage ends, there’s an acceptance of life’s ugliness, even as the possibilities beyond await. The Herald, August 18th 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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