Skip to main content

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2015 Theatre Reviews 3 - Going Viral - Four stars / Key Change - Three stars / The Paradise Project - Three stars / Here is the News From Over There (Over There Is The News From Here) - Four stars

Northern Stage at Summerhall until August 30, except Here is the News From Over There (Over There Is The News From Here) until August 29.

Mass outbreaks of grieving are nothing new these days, but what if such emotional outbursts are part of a contagious medical condition that cries real tears. So it goes in Going Viral, Daniel Bye's latest performance lecture which forms part of Northern Stage's Edinburgh programme, and which takes an idea and runs with it to a fabulist conclusion. In this case, what starts with Bye sitting in the audience unloading his assorted everyday medication explodes into a blockbuster sized saga worthy of the most paranoid of ecology-inspired science-fiction epics.

Bye plays a version of himself, who finds himself on an aeroplane sat next to a woman who starts crying for seemingly no reason. Before he knows where he is the whole world's at it, and he's being pursued by a woman who wants to know why he's remained so dry-eyed with a persistence that really is enough to make you weep.

The fact that Bye unravels his story in a self-effacingly geeky fashion makes you warm to it even more, even as he intersperses it with a bucket-load of facts and figures which here come in the shape of several hundred liquorice allsorts. Created with advice from Dr Mark Booth, Bye's piece unpeels contemporary society's fascination with disease in a way that fascinates without blinding you with science.

When the quartet of women that make up the main protagonists of Catrina McHugh's women's prison set play, Key Change, look the audience in the eye before marking out their locale with masking tape, the tone is set for a searingly honest study of life behind bars and the things that put these women in a place where they can snap as easily as the tape that here allows them to break free. Devised with real life inmates of HMP Low Newton in County Durham, Laura Lindow's production for the Open Clasp company focuses largely on the lives of habitual offender Angie (Jennifer Johnson) and first-timer Lucy (Cheryl Dixon), and the ongoing litany of poverty, drug dependency and domestic abuse that shaped them and ultimately caged them.

Fused throughout with an often furiously choreographed physicality, putting the action in a women's prison gives things a heightened poignancy, and using the real life devising process as a framing device is inspired in a heartbreaking portrait of women in confinement that's full of wit, anger, muscle, guts and a heart that beats with what it means to be free.

How do you build utopia? It's a question that isn't asked directly in The Paradise Project, a collaboration between the Third Angel and mala voadora companies, but it's the driving force behind the man and woman who embark on what looks like an end of the world experiment in this sequel of sorts to the two companies' last collaboration on What I Heard About The World. Conceived and devised by Jorge Andrade and Jose Caopela of mala voadora, Alexander Kelly and Rachael Walton of Third Angel plus Chris Thorpe, there's a science-fiction feel to a set which performers Jerry Killick and Stacey Sampson build as they go.

Over an hour, the pair construct systems as well as tables and walls as they explore notions of equality and work, rest and play in a shiny microcosm of what passes for democracy in all its flaws. All of which makes for a consciously idea-led and a playfully intelligent sixty minutes that arches an eyebrow at what lies ahead even as it maps out its blueprint for a brave new world.

A key component of Northern Stage's 2013 Edinburgh programme was The Bloody Great Border Ballad project, a late-night line-up of hot off the press lo-fi theatre and song which added a new verse each night to make up an epic twenty-first century take on Scots balladeering.

In Here is the News From Over There (Over There Is The News From Here), this follow-up goes international with a similarly loose-knit vehicle for theatre, music and art from the Middle East. While directed with easy charm by Northern Stage artistic director Lorne Campbell, it is Lebanese satirist and playwright Abdel Rahim Alawiji who is ringmaster of an event which, in its first edition, featured new work by Sabrina Mahfouz and Hassan Abdul Razzak performed script-in-hand. The latter presented a reconstruction of an increasingly absurd TV chat show unable to address notions of atheism in an Islamic society.

With a set-up that included cups of tea, a lap-top generated score, a guitar-playing magician and some live weaving from artist Susan Mowatt, here was a post-modern multi-media Happening that gave a glimpse into the rich tapestry of third world culture that looks set to grow into the most infectiously eclectic of global villages.

The Herald, August 14th 2015

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

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

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL