“And still my motto is: I dare,” says Alan Cumming at the end of his ravishing one-man evocation of Robert Burns. And if the Ayrshire poet was daring, then so, too, is the actor. Cumming has always had a slinky, insinuating presence, whether as the Emcee in Cabaret or as Dionysus, the god of good times, in The Bacchae, but he is not known for overtly physical theatre. To label Burn as dance might be stretching a point, but it is the work of two choreographers, Steven Hoggett and Vicki Manderson, and is structured with more dreamy fluidity than writerly precision. Cumming has dared to put himself in an unfamiliar place.
We see him first, arms outstretched, as Tim Lutkin’s back lighting picks out the contours of his biceps that ripple like the undulating waves of light spilling across the auditorium. His arrival signals an end to a storm, but the stripped-back set by Ana Inés Jabares-Pita remains bleak and monochrome. The floorboards are distressed and colourless, a single desk and pile of discarded paper his only company on a desolate stage backed by Andrzej Goulding’s austere video, displaying dates, locations and a galloping ghost of a horse.
Cumming, with lank hair and black eyeshadow, matches gestures to words, punctuating his run-through of the life of Burns with hand movements, swoops and stretches. When ingratiating himself with the well-to-do of Edinburgh, he skips into something like a Highland dance against the formidable pulse of Anna Meredith’s Nautilus. On chairs that seem to sink into the floor, he arches his back and makes himself weightless.
Created by Cumming and Hoggett for the National Theatre of Scotland, Burn feels like an art installation, the constituent elements of sound and light building a dynamic setting for the tale of the ploughman who made good with his rhymes without ever escaping the fear of poverty.
The Burns he presents is a man of the soil; earthy, lusty and impulsive. With a cheeky pout and raised eyebrow, it is impossible to know where Burns stops and Cumming starts, as he gives rugged texture to the poetry and maverick life to an imperfect national hero.
At King’s theatre, Edinburgh, until 10 August.
