EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL 2001.
Edinburgh Festival 2001
Click on Read More for reviews of the three drama events in week one of the 2001 Edinburgh International Festival
NOVOCENTO
by Alessandro Baricco
translated Michael Golding/Joseph Farrell
Theatre de Quat'sous, Montreal
At the Royal Lyceum Theatre 13-18 August
It's been filmed as 1900, the story of a baby found on shipboard while US immigrants spill ashore at the last century's start. The boy who grew up known as 1900 became a pianist who outplayed Jelly Roll Morton, then chose to die with the ship which was his world.
The film had a large cast; the stage play has one man, Tom McCamus (with a single Edinburgh performance in French by Pierre Lebeau). He's glimpsed dimly amid smoke and picked out by gradually increasing shafts of light, sitting in coat and hat, the trumpet-player who jazzed alongside 1900 over eight years.
Through the hundred minutes of Francois Girard's production McCamus holds the audience spellbound with his quiet, subtly modulating voice. The lighting (by Marc Parent) slowly intensifies to the play's midpoint, making clear we're in a ship's coal-hold (designer Francois Seguin), the kind where he last met 1900. Eventually McCamus stands, removes his hat - a big gesture in this show - and recalls the final encounter and the climactic explanation why 1900 could never step off the deck, preferring a shipboard death to life ashore.
For the ship is a limited place in a limitless ocean. What frightened 1900 the one time he stepped on the gangplank was the unending cityscape with its threat of a world without form.
Forever underscoring McCamus' words is a deep pulsing, which sound designer Nancy Tobin gradually evolves from the throb of a ship's engine into quietly insistent piano notes. Only at the end are these balanced and resolved by high piano chords.
TOO LATE FOR LOGIC
by Tom Murphy
Royal Lyceum Theatre Company
At the King's Theatre 13-18 August
Tom Murphy's not a welcoming writer. His character ellipses and a plot giving context some way after incident, keep his world at arm's length. And length is a factor. At 110 minutes this was the longest (just) of three week one EIF shows with not an interval between them.
Fortunately the King's seats are comfortable, the dialogue brisk and intelligent and the acting almost all high quality. Murphy seems to start with the suicide of Duncan Bell's philosophy lecturer Christopher. It's a reversal of Chekhov's maxim - show a gun in act one and use it in act three. The gun Christopher apparently shoots himself with at the opening recurs halfway through when it's swapped for a rubber toy (someone's done a swap to keep his brother from a threatened murder) then at the end when he throws it away.
Or does he? The script says Christopher 'appears to be tossing the gun away and there is a bang'. His last line is 'It probably didn't work anyway'. But the bang comes as he still has the barrel pointing right at him. Does the gun really not work properly? Accidents will happen.
While the action luxuriates in the sounds of operatic sopranos' love and loss, Christopher cannot relate to the family around him - in the loop of the play's action he starts and ends alone, though surrounded by those he knows. His brother Michael (Hugh Ross) is his opposite, happily drinking through the night, making friends casually in the bar run by the welcoming Monica (Juliet Cadzow), where events force Christopher away from preparing a lecture on Schopenhauer.
Thematically, Too Late for Logic might not go much beyond a mix of Tom Stoppard's Jumpers and Simon Gray's Otherwise Engaged but Murphy's is a distinct world - it doesn't feel like either of those. Both Patrick Mason's pinpoint production and the spare elegance of Francis O'Connor's designs enhance that world.
OFFICE
by Shan Khan
Soho Theatre Company
At the Royal Lyceum Theatre 13-18 August
Playing late night in a fit-up studio on the Lyceum stage Khan's debut play is like a dirty secret (albeit a sold-out show). Rightly, too. What has the Lyceum's genteel elegance to do with this King's Cross underworld of drugdealing and prostitution? (Well, to believe one newspaper, the Edinburgh Festival draws prostitutes from across Europe, since the city's druggy repute makes visitors fear the health status of the local lassies on the game).
The office is two public telephones, with a waste bin as stockroom. The patter sounds dead authentic and the play works best as 'scenes in the life of'. When these people fear the police it's in the form of James Ryland's corrupt copper Pringle, who's leeching on their business not taking them in. Perhaps this is how they carry on despite being repeatedly caught on CCTV.
The action's development is fitful and there are times acting technique in Abigail Morris's expert production is used to paper over lack of plot propulsion. The end, which reverses the relationship of Avin Shah's efficient dealer Sharky and his colleague Showtime's (Mark Tonderai) Mr Nice Guy persona, is melodramatic, but so are a lot of things that happen on city streets at night.
The word promising was made for this play. It's short enough to fit in a double-bill with Pinter's The Dumb Waiter with which it comes to have a thing or two in common.
Meanwhile it completes a first Festival week's drama where nothing disappoints, seems trivial or overblown. A good year to date.
COMING...
20-25 August Antwerp's De Onderneming in two linked plays about wartime Europe, The Notebook and Proof, by Agota Kristof (in English).
28 August-1 September Vienna's Burgtheater in a repertory of Thomas Bernhardt's Alte Meister and Chekhov's Seagull.
FESTIVAL TICKETS 0131 473 2000
2001-08-22 10:08:31