DIAS DE LAS NOCHES. To 30 August.

Edinburgh

DIAS DE LAS NOCHES
by Teatr Novogo Fronta

St Stephens (Aurora Nova) To 30 August 2004
Thu-Tue 11.30am
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS: 0131 558 3853
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 August

Physically exhilarating presentation of theatre and revolution.No show is so precisely timed as this. An actor recurrently tells us the times to the minute. It pinpoints his fascination with the main events which occurred during a politically explosive time in 1974 Buenos Aires. Thena young child events unfolded around him. It's only thirty years on that he tries to relate his present to the young child that was alive through that time.

In St Stephens' open-space arena, this South American stoy is told by a company from the Czech Republic and Russia, both of which have seen political overturns iwithin that 30 years. This might lead to an over-political view of the production, which mixes the exhilaration and (less succesfully) clownish humour of the variety theatre with images of agony and death seen behind translucent curtains or in writhing figures above the stage.

As much as that, the play is about a sense of transience, and trying to recover a sense of self out of that condition. The exhilaration of an individual performance, with its many-people contributions, evaporates. Add to that the need to migrate and lose a whole culture and language (stay-at-homes who fulminate about asylum seekers should see the show) and Dias de las Noches has a poignant place at this year's Fringe, making it more than the sum of its physically active parts.

2004-08-24 13:08:32