What a light the National Theatre of Scotland has thrown on the country and its drama. In the year of its founding, 2006, the company ignited the Edinburgh festival with John Tiffany’s freewheeling production of Gregory Burke’s ferocious exploration of white male tribalism, Black Watch. This year, Nat McCleary’s Thrown shows very different Scottish faces. Look, no men!
Johnny McKnight’s snappy production begins with women hurtling across the stage in satin fighting gear, but though the play is full of jousting for position, its focus is on cooperation. Uniformity is the opposite of the point as a group of females gather to learn how to do backhold wrestling in preparation for the Highland Games. Imogen is rich and black and mourning her twin sister; Chantelle is poor and white, struggling with memories of her alcoholic mother, avid for leopard-skin leggings and a small dog that won’t go out of fashion. Jo’s Jamaican mother is dead; she has a white father, knows Gaelic and is aiming for a job in London; Chantelle, her oldest girlfriend, calls her Coco Pop. Helen is white and elderly (when she turns up for practice she is told “the knittin group is in the next room”) and always wanted to be a wife. The white coach (Lesley Hart is particularly strong) roars about clearing energy channels and is not sure whether she feels more male or female. All of them are Scottish.
This is a welcome corrective to cliches – about Scotland and about what counts as privilege. A final speech, urging people to stand together while acknowledging differences, is truly something to live by, its sentiment neatly captured in the creation of a tartan that weaves together threads of all the teammates’ experience. The shortcoming of the evening is that its ingredients are too evident, each life history too explicitly spelled out; the action would benefit from having more episodes springing from the actual (very interesting) wrestling. An audience is likely to be gripped but not finally thrown.
This festival is not short on political instruction and fervour. Comédie de Genève’s Dusk, staged in French (with surtitles) by the Brazilian director Christiane Jatahy, is an exploration of how fascism takes hold. Though described as “based on” Lars von Trier’s film Dogville, it is no re-creation but an attempt to rework the events of the movie to suggest that a welcome extended to a stranger need not have ended gruesomely, that acceptance did not have to result in abuse, that reconciliation and harmony could have been reached.
The apparatus of the argument is elaborate. Nothing is quite what it seems. Video runs at the back of the stage, so that the evening is only partly theatre: it glides between stage and film. Characters film themselves onstage so that what they do is seen in duplicate, but it becomes apparent that these sequences are interspliced with other episodes not seen on stage. Von Trier’s film is evoked – but in order to contradict it. Audiences watching characters who are oversuspicious of strangers are themselves urged to be wary of what they see.
The French title is apparently less welcoming than the romantic English “dusk”: referring – “entre chien et loup” – to hours when a grin becomes a snarl, the night begins to show its teeth; in Brazil, the time at which Bolsonaro came to power and democracy came under threat. The appeal in the closing moments made directly to the audience by the character seeking refuge is powerful, but the extraordinary intricacy of the action is more admirable than engaging.
It is hard to resist the legerdemain of Geoff Sobelle’s new show Food, which changes utterly in the course of an hour and a half. First, broody meditative reflections: presiding over a giant table, around which some audience members actually sit, Sobelle murmurs about evolution. Then satirical joshing about possible menus: spectators are presented with raw eggs, an apple, a stiff-looking curry and asked for some reactions to the wine as it is poured. I admired the man who said it evoked “a plastics factory in China”.
The conjuring up of requested food becomes more and more adventurous, and Sobelle – the description of him as “clown” helps prepare for this – skids across the table, dry ice rising from the white cloth: he discovers an Arctic hole at its centre and plucks from it a wiggling fish to plonk on a diner’s plate. The supper concludes with a gluttonous feat in which Sobelle appears to gulp steak and wine and eggs and reduce half a dozen apples to cores in seconds.
It is not the moral musing – on wasted resources and greed – that makes the evening memorable but its transforming final section. Sobelle whips away the napery to expose an expanse of earth. Seedlings push up through the soil to become crops. A tiny tractor scoots towards them. Toy lorries are distributed by spectators, as if they were waiters handing out bread, and pushed around the table by the audience. A tiny oil rig appears. A table has been turned: from an enlarged version of domestic life to a shrunk version of the world.
Star ratings (out of five)
Thrown ★★★
Dusk ★★★
Food ★★★
