Seeing is believing, right? That is a phrase used repeatedly by Mamoru Iriguchi and co-star Gavin Pringle in What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed/What You Don’t See When Your Eyes Are Open (★★★★☆). It is an amusingly hand-stitched investigation into ways of seeing, performed in one of Summerhall’s small basement rooms at the Edinburgh fringe. The production treats the challenges faced by people who are blind or visually impaired as a creative resource. The costumes are bold, the lines distinct, the faces larger than life and, in the most idiosyncratic way, everything is captioned and described. It is surreal and, despite its deliberate repetitions, never predictable.
If seeing really was believing, we would accept that the man in the outsize Mamoru Iriguchi mask, his grey suit outlined in thick black lines, his enormous glasses showing sleeping eyes, was indeed Mamoru Iriguchi. We would also surmise that the giant cyclops standing in the centre of the room, in a bushy coat of orange tassels and a purple head concealing a live video projector behind its gigantic single eye, was his husband, Gavin.
In fact, it is the other way around. In the dark of the night, when eyesight is unreliable, they have mistakenly put on each other’s clothes. Cue a hasty costume swap. But not before some initial thoughts on watching and being watched and a repeated dream-like sequence in which man and monster do battle, observed from a television studio where the newscaster reads a script that spews out of the cyclops’s mouth like tickertape.
To add to the tension – or do I mean jollity? – we join in by singing action-movie theme tunes before getting to our feet to consider our own use of sight. Iriguchi has been reading James J Gibson’s study of animals seeing other animals in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979) and he asks us to consider our own field of view. How much do we rely on peripheral vision, how often do we swivel our necks to keep someone in sight and how do we get a sense of a three-dimensional object?
He slips back into his dreams, recalling his Japanese childhood and his mother’s favourite stars – Elvis Presley, James Dean – whom we can still see because of film, itself a kind of dream. Perspectives shift and the projector dances across the walls in a production that is as eccentric as it is thoughtful.
“I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better,” is a phrase attributed to the late broadcaster Alistair Cooke and it is one Canada’s Ghost River Theatre appears to have taken to heart. To “see” its engrossing production at Assembly Checkpoint of Tomorrow’s Child (★★★★☆), an adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story published in 1948, you are blindfolded and led, three at a time, into an auditorium equipped with 10 speakers surrounding the audience.
With direction and sound design by Matthew Waddell and Eric Rose (who worked on the adaptation with David van Belle), we are catapulted into the futuristic year of 1988 when a trip to the maternity hospital begins with a helicopter moving in from a distance, its faint hum turning into a cacophony of rotor blades as it circles us.
Expectant parents Polly (Anna Cummer) and Peter (Tyrell Crews), moving dreamily around the space, have an appointment for a hi-tech birth. Quite what takes place on the ward is down to your imagination, but the industrial barrage of scrapes, grinds and judders, sound layered upon sound, suggests it is something very technical.
A little too technical as it turns out. Dr Wolcott (David van Belle) brings the bad news: their baby boy has been accidentally delivered into the fourth dimension. All they can see of him is all that you, blindfolded and alert, can see with your mind’s eye.
• What You See When Your Eyes Are Closed/What You Don’t See When Your Eyes Are Open is at Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Tomorrow’s Child is at Assembly Checkpoint, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
