EDINBURGH COLUMN 2
Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical / The Table (Stolik) / Auto Auto /
Special /
Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea / Teenage Kicks
Various venues, Edinburgh
August, 2007
There are musicals and then there are musicals, and then there are
Fringe oddities to cherish. I don't mean the likes of Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical (E4
Udderbelly), which manages to exploit our prurience about seeing a
stage version of the legendary porn movie whilst being almost
wholesome. There is far weirder stuff on offer.
At Aurora Nova, long an esteemed Fringe centre for international
visual/physical theatre, The Table
(Stolik) consists of four Polish guys playing a table.
Musically, not dramatically. The Karbido company sit around it, beat
it, scrape it, cajole it in all kinds of ways and generate fiendish
polyrhythms as they do so. The table is not only miked but also
conceals an arsenal of electronic jiggery-pokery and, it gradually
transpires, several sets of guitar strings, a flute and even a
digeridoo all built into the thing. Remarkable soundscapes are built
up, playing both original material and extant numbers: I promise you
will never hear a version of The Stooges' "Now I Wanna Be Your Dog"
quite like this one.
By semi-coincidence the very next show I saw, Auto Auto (Pleasance Courtyard)
consists of two men doing much the same to a car. The difference is
that Christian von Richthofen and his colleague move from playing the
car's body with fists and feet to sticks, then an axe, a couple of
sledgehammers and even an angle grinder, so that by the end the poor
saloon is left a shredded hulk. Apparently they prefer the Astra Mk 2
as being better tuned (their pun, not mine), but the Lothians have no
more Astras left to sacrifice, so the performance I saw involved the
rather more resistant bodywork of a Rover 414. One uncharitable voice
remarked on the German sense of humour, doing to a single car what they
had already done to the company. Their theme tune? "If I Had A Hammer".
One poor man's body is almost played upon in the same way in Special (Assembly Universal Arts).
John Keates' company Fecund Theatre have long been interested in
powerplay and disquiet, both amongst characters and between actors and
audience; but this, the first show of theirs that I have seen in
several years, takes things to a new level of unsettling purity by
matter-of-factly portraying episodes in a couple's sado-masochistic
relationship. It is a succession of inflictions of pain both physical
and psychological, but carefully presented with a detachment that
prevents us from responding to the material sexually, either in
titillation or disgust. We have to deal with the material entirely on a
mental level.
In comparison, Between The Devil And
The Deep Blue Sea (Underbelly) is almost mundane. Likened to "Shockheaded Peter done by posh
girls", this gleefully black creation by the young 1927 company blends
live action by a pair of white-faced performers and music by a third
with wonderful faux-Expressionist animations to tell a series of
cautionary tales about greed, lust or simply straying off the path
through the forest. At the end of the show, one poor punter is enticed
to join the two girls as their grandmother playmate, and promptly
vanishes into the screen in a kind of Ringu-in-reverse
sequence.
Teenage Kicks (also at
Universal Arts) operates less as a whistle-stop tour through legendary
DJ John Peel's years at the BBC than as an act of collective homage.
The banter between Peel and his producer John Walters all sounds
eminently realistic given the real pair's twisted epigrams, but it is
the succession of interleaved testimonies of Peelie's influence on
successive generations of listeners with which we really identify. It
reminds you once again how irreplaceable he was. A similar sense of
loss hit me when watching the reformed Mancunian band James play in the
T On the Fringe strand of rock events. An audience that seemed too
young to remember the band's early-1990s heyday nevertheless went ape
at virtually every number, yet when singer Tim Booth dedicated a new
song "to Tony Wilson, who died today", barely a handful of us reacted
at all. Sic transit gloria Factory.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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