HIDEAWAY

Edinburgh Fringe

HIDEAWAY: Stories from Secret Places
devised by the company

Quiconque Theatre Company at Pleasance Dome 3 To 25 August 2003
2.35pm
Runs 1hr 10min No interval

TICKETS: 0131 556 6550
Review: Timothy Ramsden 5 August

The sort of show you dream about finding on the Fringe..
This wonderful, rich, moving and resonant piece is about hiding and ways out of it. A series of interwoven stories, it's highly-charged without ever becoming overtly theatrical. Script and movement interplay with expert fluidity, strengthening each other's impact. It's that rare thing, a new piece that's entirely perfect, imbued with a strength that's altogether out of proportion to its small-scale brevity. I only hope the company intends to tour it as widely as possible.

Foremost is the story of two Jewish sisters holed up 4 years on a French farm (the goodness of the people who risked Nazi reprisals to save these youngsters is left for us to infer rightly, the action focuses on their experience).

Fear of capture is overwhelmed by a need to experience the open-air and they have to be smuggled out under covers in a wheelbarrow. As they grow from 8 and 16 to 12 and 20, the sisters are presented by Lynne Forbes and Nadia Morgan with dispassionate narrative, but made to live in their physicality, aided only by battered suitcases.

Other characters whose tales are told range from Catherine de Medici hidden in a convent as a child to prevent her being exploited owing to her wealth (and, apparently, inventor of the high-heeled shoe) - through Russian crime-fodder sewer-rats' to the fine story of a bullied comprehensive school-girl huddled fearfully in the toilets, then having her life transformed by finding a new dignity out of a surprise discovery in the next cubicle.

There's an astonishing maturity to this piece. Not least, in its admirable concentration and reticence a refusal to exploit the characters for theatrical effect. It's full of hope for humanity but never cheapens it by sentimentality or glibness; there are unhappy ends as well as happy ones but no loose ends. Performances and direction are flawless in concentration and detail. See it, just see it.

Performers:
Lynne Forbes, Nadia Morgan

Director: Catherine Alexander
Designer: Kye Smith-Mackintosh
Lighting: Flick Ansell
Sound: Adrienne Quartly

2003-08-10 15:49:31