They
saved the best till last. Of the nine openings which constitute the
bulk of this year’s Traverse programme, stripped across two full days
at the beginning of the Edinburgh Fringe, it was the final one that
contained one of the performances of the year. Tom Holloway’s
And No More Shall We Part is a
two-hander for actors of a certain age, about euthanasic suicide. As
Pam, who resolves to pre-empt her unspecified terminal illness before
it destroys her, Dearbhla Molloy is measured and stoical but without
seeming to stint on emotion. However, it is Bill Paterson as her
husband Don who is simply magnificent. He blusters, splutters and
refuses to let go of a single atom of possible comfort in the
prolongation of his beloved’s life. Scarcely a sentence is completed;
the power is all in the break-offs, in the minimal gestures such as the
way he strokes the panel of her bedroom door when sleeping before it,
unable to leave for a bed of his own. It is like watching a toughened
glass windscreen shatter in exquisitely slow motion.
The other picks of this year’s crop are in the smaller Traverse Two. In
Mess, Caroline Horton deploys
a serenity not unlike Molloy’s, in the role of an erratically
recovering anorexic; despite the bleak subject matter, however, the
predominant tone is a delicate whimsy not unlike Hugh Hughes’ pieces
for Hoipolloi. It ought not to work, but it does, charmingly. In
Bullet Catch, Rob Drummond
re-creates several magic tricks over the course of an hour, culminating
in the one which gives the show its title. He is ostensibly examining
an instance of the trick’s failure in 1912, but covertly he meditates
upon spirituality and the value of existence, all the while slowly
grooming a member of the audience to fire the potentially fatal gun at
him at the climax.
Back in the main house, those twin colossi, the Scottish playwriting
Davids, Greig and Harrower, offer a double-bill loosely related to
Scotland’s hosting of Britain’s principal nuclear naval base. In
Greig’s
The Letter Of Last Resort
(first seen earlier this year as part of “The Bomb” package at the
Tricycle in London), a Prime Minister, briefed by an unhelpfully
philosophical adviser, has to decide whether to leave instructions for
retaliation or non- in the event of a hypothetical future nuclear
attack on Britain; in Harrower’s
Good
With People (from the “A Play, A Pie And A Pint” lunchtime
series at Glasgow’s Óran Mór), a young man and a hotel receptionist in
Helensburgh ruthlessly antagonise each other but gradually reconcile,
whilst uncovering glimpses of insight into perceptions of the British
military presence in civilian communities both at home and abroad.
The remainder of the Trav’s fare is competent but unexciting. After
2008’s exhilarating
Once And For All…
and 2010’s insulting
Teenage Riot,
Belgian teenager Koba Ryckewaert (now 18) returns for a third show by
provocateurs Ontroerend Goed. In
All
That Is Wrong she spends an hour chalking a personal
psychogeography on the floor. It is more performance art than theatre,
and would be dull indeed except that her gradual manipulation by
co-performer Zach Hatch finally raises, however vaguely and obliquely,
the issue of exploitation that Ontroerend Goed are happy to foist on
their audiences time and again but have never hitherto perceptibly
examined in respect of themselves.
Simon Stephens’ second major opening within a week (after his
adaptation of
The Curious Incident
Of The Dog In The Night-Time at the National Theatre),
Morning, is unlikely to cause as
much brouhaha as his
Three Kingdoms
or
The Trial Of Ubu a few
months ago.. As staged by Sean Holmes (in the style of his sometime
collaborators Filter) for the Lyric Hammersmith’s Young Company, it
portrays a sociopathic teenage girl’s impulsive murder of her
boyfriend. It initially promises little more than a superior
Skins-style vignette, but Stephens’
trademark spare, unflinching style gradually allows echoes of the Mary
Bell case to seep through. Phil Porter’s
Blink (from Soho Theatre and
nabokov) and Ronan O’Donnell’s
Angels
(another product of the Óran Mór programme) are, respectively, a
two-hander about an awkward, obsessive and ultimately abortive love
affair and a solo piece in which a security guard held in police
custody on (mistaken) suspicion of murder fantasises about Scarlett
Johansson. Both are excellently acted –
Blink by Harry McEntire and Rosie
Wyatt,
Angels by the
redoubtable Iain Robertson – but in each case the play proves too
slight to compel attention.
The final piece in this first wave of Traverse offerings follows in the
wake of comedian Daniel Kitson’s successful series of storytelling
shows at this venue. Kitson’s own 2012 work opens in a few days, but in
the meantime Mark Thomas forsakes his blend of stand-up and activism
for
Bravo Figaro!, an account
of his South London bruiser of a father’s unlikely passion for opera,
which Thomas himself inherited. In a similar style to his past
political protest stunts, Thomas organised a kind of farewell to his
dementia-suffering father by wangling a group of singers from the Royal
Opera House to give a recital in his parents’ Bournemouth bungalow
living-room. The hour-long story is peppered with Thomas’s
characteristic bluntness in comedic, political and family-nostalgic
modes alike. Ultimately, though, for all his skill as a performer, it
cannot transcend being so palpably the product of a deep personal need
to “pay off” his memories of his father.
Written for the Financial
Times.