CAIN'S HAT. To 24 August.
Edinburgh - Fringe
CAIN'S HAT
by Gabor Goda
Artus, Hungary at St Stephen's, St Stephen's Street To 24 August 2002
3.15pm
Runs 1hr No interval
TICKETS 0131 558 3853 (11am-10pm)
Review Timothy Ramsden 20 August
What a Festival's for - Artus is a discovery, and good company to keep.Hungary's Artus is a dance company that has broadened its vocabulary into physical theatre and tackles major myths and currents flowing underneath the surfaces of human experience.
This piece is concerned with Cain - the Bible's first murderer and destroyer. And with hats, garments little-used these days in the West but standing for cover, protection and disguise - think of all the shamuses and hoods who slouch a titfer across their features for concealment in a thousand celluloid crime stories. The company would add fear and deference to this list.
Constructed cinematically itself, the piece is an image montage and a lot of the visceral joy of the show is in the brilliance and originality of its images and the sheer skill with which they are portrayed. Themes, in a sense, come later if you want them. Structurally, though, they have to be there.
Such theatre depends on the coherence of its images and the way they construct - through development, contrast, repetition - their own thematic narrative. Here the quiet opening introduces a calmly godlike ordainer of what is to follow and - atop a totem-like column- a female figure who often sings wordlessly into a microphone, enhancing the pre-recorded soundtrack.
She's generally impassive to the sufferings and conflicts below, only later seeming to respond or look away, before being finally disturbed from her powerful positioning back centre of the stage.
Death's present from the birth of the action, in the grave-like stone mound at this totem's foot. Images of power and destruction are played out before it; stones from this mound are used to create smaller totems, smashed by other stones. A stone dropped on a hat creases it into a stylised mask, worn over a face with its own eyes, nose and mouth.
Balance and competition are strongly played out as characters face each other - and face-off each other - over improvised desk-like structures, or as they balance on columns, till one colonises the other's space.
Cain's Hat is one section of an Artus trilogy. Let's hope somebody (or some body) with the wit and spending-power will bring the whole lot back to these shores.
Director: Gabor Goda
Aurora Nova is produced by fabrik, Potsdam and Komedia, Brighton
Season sponsor: Cafedirect
2002-08-21 10:46:58