LONG LIFE. To 2 September.
Edinburgh
LONG LIFE
The Hub To 2 September 2006
Wed-Mon 7.30pm
Runs 2hr No interval
TICKETS: 0131 473 2000
www.eif.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 August
Theatrical energy that only tells part of the story.
Scotland's at least the 21st country to have seen New Riga Theatre's senior citizens show. Its 5 characters are well into bus-pass land, and though they murmur and occasionally mutter (not to mention snore and fart on occasion), the only clear voice comes from a much younger-sounding TV presenter. As such, the piece can hardly be said to give a voice to the elderly as it shows them in a home, each getting through the day at an age when every action can become an effort and an energy-using event in itself.
As bravura theatre, it's easy to see why the piece was picked for the Edinburgh International Festival. Little happens, there's no more shape than's given by the sense of a rising-to-bedtime. Yet the 2 hours' continuous playing-time hardly becomes tedious. The set, displayed along the length of EIF Centre The Hub's long upstairs hall, is a mine of domestic detail, well worth a look afterwards (it's hidden behind walls before the show starts).
There's an apparent choice between which part of the action to watch - it proceeds simultaneously in each room, though it seems the director ensures key moments are arranged sequentially. And some moments make a point. Seeing a wife (presumably) inject her husband in the posterior is amusing, especially as the deliberate actions build gradually to the moment of insertion. But it shows that's what love becomes; and implies the quedstion of what will happen when she's no longer there to give him the daily insertion.
It's hard to place this, only the second modern Latvian piece to reach Britain, within a national theatre scene. But as the piece proceeds, its characters start to veer closer to comic turns than understood individuals. But it's questionable how much the sprinklings of laughter the piece provoked in Edinburgh were sympathetic understanding, how much laughter at the ways of the old.
Long Life demands actors noticeably younger than its characters.Apart form the nightly stamina reqwuired, one character is forever climbing on rickety furniture to paint a ceiling or hang a picture. However, the age gap introduces an element of caricature.
The interesting features tend to be those that make for theatrical energy; one man's interest in his synthesizer and its sounds makes a marked point about the old embracing the new. But life shows remarkable variety within the later decades. I've sat among care-home inhabitants drowing over Saturday morning Youth TV and spoken to someone who told me (before driving himself 100 miles home late at night) about his 80th birthday present flight in a Tiger Moth, where the regular pilot had to insist on taking back the controls for a final victory roll. There's a lot more to later life than Long Life allows.
Cast:
Guna Zarina, Baiba Broka, Kaspars Znotins, Girtts Krumins, Vilis Daudzins
Director: Alvis Hermanis
Designer/Costume: Monika Pormale
Lighting: Oskars Plataiskalns
Sound: Gatis Builis
2006-08-27 18:21:15