RUNNING GIRL. To 6 July.
Edinburgh
RUNNING GIRL
by Gary Young
Boilerhouse Theatre Company at Corn Exchange, Edinburgh To 6 July 2002
Review Timothy Ramsden 6 July
Reconfigured for its Edinburgh venue, and with the restoration of a scene lost through cast injury in Glasgow, Boilerhouse's large-scale show emerges as even better on a second viewing.The sheer excitement of Running Girl's action – with Kate Dickie's young woman pounding on a treadmill as her lost character races the night-time streets of a suddenly strange city in a search for home – remains second time round. The tense exchanges with the attention-seeking suicide Jumper, the crazed-eyed female street preacher, the manic car-crash victim and the repeated emergence of a mysterious interrogator are amplified by the unnerving scene in which two Sirens try to lure our Girl into their ultimately deadly cheats.
And Angeline Ferguson's video, flashing past on two giant portable screens, remains integral. Running Girl mixes its media wisely, allowing video and live performance to focus on what they do well, with visual and textual images supporting each other, instead of colliding, repeating or cancelling each other out.
Having once swung across the plot's suspense hooks, a second look lets the thriller-like story emerge in its intricately-designed detail, with video images creating, filling-in and reviewing backstory, playing off the spoken script's exploration of the present tense human experience.
Integral throughout is Graham Cunnington's live-performed score, atmospheric yet doing much more than merely mood-setting. In a sense it defines the pace of the action, urgently matching the pounding feet, or letting a two-note phrase calm the beat in time with the central character's later, more reflective thoughts or, again, sending sustained chords out over events, gearing them to more complex levels.
This is a piece where the action could be said to last six seconds, or a lifetime. It's a superbly constructed story, a searing, shifting depiction of a relationship re-examined in maddened hindsight and a slowly-unfolding, poetically detailed account of a life caught between bruising realities and temporary escape through human skill and endurance.
The opening video images of childhood happiness hauntingly return in the light of darker, newly-perceived realities. And as, cinematically, the end-credits roll, the depth, passion and exhilarating pace of the piece, with Dickie's splendid, if doubtless exhausting performance, have offered a spectacle as throat-clutching as Spielberg on form and as thought-provoking as they come.
Marsha: Christina Cochran
Bruno: Robin Sneller
Running Girl: Kate Dickie
Jumper: Robert Vesty
Siren 1: Cait Davis
Siren 2: Lee Hart
Preacher: Joy McBrinn
Paramedics: Kevin McIsaac, Donna McCulloch
Running Girl (Understudy): Lesley Hart
Director: Paul Pinson
Designer: Caroline Grebbell
Lighting: Paul Sorley
Sound: Kenny Christie
Vision Mixer: Ian Ferguson
Camera: Kristina Devlin
Video/Film Artist: Angeline Ferguson
Composer: Graham Cunnington
2002-07-11 01:49:01