The Edinburgh Festival’s 70th birthday kicked off with Bloom, an impressive light show with music and images projecting 70 years of news onto the buildings of St Andrew Square. Scottish independence, Trump and Brexit are the prial of political themes this year, in places large and small. In a feat of theatrical therapy, more than 20 shows feature Donald Trump. Problem is, political theatre is often of the dog-whistle variety.
Good political theatre should ask you to think, not prescribe what to think, so it was a delight to find some thoughtful shows. We don’t need to be lectured or hectored into thinking that we appear poleaxed in Western democracy. Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros offers more subtle commentary. Portraying a village in France where the locals are turning into rhinoceroses, the hapless Bérenger, brilliantly mastered by Robert Jack, stands alone in defiance as he loses his friends to the phenomenon, crying out for human fallibility against the herd.
It is fitting that a Turkish company should partner with a Scottish theatre – two ends of the European conundrum – to show our current predicament in such a humorous and manic light. Zinnie Harris’s adaptation is thrilling and refreshing for our times. Murat Daltaban’s direction keeps the drama consistently absorbing, with visually stunning staging by Tom Piper and Chris Davey. The bath scene by Bérenger’s friend Jean (played in handbrake turns of power and subtlety by Steven McNicoll) was powerful: revealing the transformation into a rhinoceros as a believable occurrence.
Staging the politics of science is not easily done, but offers many dramatic opportunities if done right. Paper Doll achieves this. A new futuristic play by Susan Eve Haar tackles the troubling ethics of cloning, but isn’t lost in the science. She has written a thought-provoking insight into the nature of human love amidst the possibilities of science. Jen can’t have a baby and so husband Rog arranges to have her cloned as a surprise anniversary gift. Premiered in the city of Dolly the Sheep, this future is not so far away. Rog sees the cloned baby as an act of his love, but the couple keep pulling back and forth in a dance of love, tenderly directed by Abigail Zealey Bess.
Gun control, America’s political hot potato, is tackled by The Gun Show, taking us beyond the polarised debate. Guns are in the Constitution, and are useful if you live an hour away from the nearest police officer in rural Oregon, where writer Ellen Lewis grew up, and where the play starts.
Played by a man, powerfully so by Vic Shambry, Ellen relates five stories about guns. With slick direction it pulls no punches, neither preaching nor bullying. The play recognises the real tragedy of guns is the lack of progress, and so the killing goes on. Children die. Domestic incidents end in death. In Ellen’s case it is her husband’s suicide, and as we learn in this poignant production guns are frequently the tools of suicide.
One political event widely celebrated at this year’s festival is the 50th anniversary of decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. Scotland waited until 1980. Lord Dismiss Us is Glenn Chandler’s adaptation of Michael Campbell’s 1967 novel set in a boy’s boarding school seemingly rife with perversion. A new headmaster, deftly played by David Mullen in a dual role as the effete chaplain, is determined to stamp it out and starts a purge with his wife, charmingly played by Felicity Duncan as a keen helper to her husband, while ambiguously attached to the chaplain.
Caught in the middle of this is Terry, a wonderful new talent in Joshua Oakes-Rogers, entangled with Peter but idealistically in love with new boy Nicholas, who plans to enter the Church. The play hurtles at a pace just short of an Orton farce, culminating in a Wildean pastiche of a school play and the most intentionally atrocious Canadian accent you’ll ever hear, climaxing in Terry’s proclamation of victory as a writer.
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A few other productions are worth noting. Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary features a very earthy and absorbing treatment by Jean Wilde. Evocation, a translation of Giraud’s symbolist classic, is performed evocatively through music, poetry and gothic puppetry by a forceful Audrey L’Ebrellec. The Italia Conti Ensemble 2017 takes us on a good romp through Brecht’s The Good Person of Sichuan. New York’s talented ensemble Squeaky Wheelz brings us the creatively apocalyptic Someone Dies at the End, while Naughty Corner’s Church Blitz is a chaotically funny take on five people hiding in a church against an unknown, possibly extraterrestrial, force.
The last word goes to Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s play of a mystified 69-year-old Krapp, enigmatically performed by legendary Irish actor Barry McGovern, reflecting frustratingly on the tapes of his 39-year-old self. At the end he disappears into the darkness, leaving us to reflect. If only such reflection could be translated into more thoughtful politics, we might have less darkness.
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