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Rough magic in the kitchen
See one of the best shows in Edinburgh without ever leaving your house. Words: Mark Fisher
Caliban is crawling out of the bathroom. Ferdinand is in the kitchen cooking an omelette. There’s a hell of a storm brewing in the liying room. It certainly makes a change from CITV for my Saturday morning entertainment.
Look up the entry for Signal To NOise in the Fringe Programme, and you’ll see it Includes neither date nor time. To see its production of The Tempest, it’s up to you to prowde the venue, be it your flat, your local restaurant or the nearest car park. I booked them for a post-breakfast performance round at my place.
Gimmick? Well, undoubtedly, it's a qumtessentially Edinburgh Fringe experience — six young actors Jumping on the furniture, turning off the lights, illuminating each other with hand-held torches while you and your mates look on at close range — but it's more than novelty value that makes The Tempest a brilliant show. Director Chris Goode's first idea was to stage Shakespeare’s play. Only then did he think about where to do it. It is the p!ay’s themes of transformation, of dreams and illu5ions, of magic (and a very rough magic at that) that make the domestic space an ideal setting. His production turns the familiar into the remarkable.
Brought to book
Cult novels hit the stage
It's a year for bringing coals to Newcastle. Mo theatre companies, one from Budapest, the other from Canada, have come all the way to the Fringe to perform adaptations of cult Edinburgh novels. Barry Graham,
Aug.
Book of Man and turned it into a one-man show. You can find out if it works at Komedia @ Southside, 12.45pm, until 27
Meanwhile, Canada's Raven Productions has joined forces with a group of Scottish actors to present one of the stories from Irvine
Have shOw ill travel
'VV‘M '.
With no preparation, the company arrives, briefly checks out the light sockets, closes the curtains and sets to work. In a little under two hours, the actors perform the play straight through, challenging each other to make use of whatever props and furniture they come across, transforming a mundane living space into a site for the imagination. So captivating is their craft that you find nothing anachronistic about Prospero standing next to the televiSion, Alonso lying prostrate on the kitchen floor or Miranda and Ferdinand making out in front of the breakfast cereal.
The consequence is that when Prospero reaches the production's final speech - the beautiful ’We are such stuff as dreams are made on' passage lifted from Act IV — and he tells us that the ’actors are melted into air’, we are left With a heart-breaking sense of an extraordinary moment haying passed. In truth, the actors really have left the bUilding never to return, and it's hard to imagine yOur house feeling quite the same again. The genius of Goode’s interpretation, performed by an endearing ensemble cast with a fine command of the language, is that it finds physical form for the play’s deepest themes.
’I realised that because it’s all set in one place and one time, it would be lovely to take over a space and transform it and vanish at the end and leave it transformed,’ Goode told me later. 'We do probably three-quarters of our shows in domestic spaces and we hear back that people find the house stays a little bit bewitched.‘
I The Tempest (Fringe) Signal To Noise, 07939 58807 7.
awards over in Edmonton and in nightclubs across Canada where one critic pronounced it superior to the adaptation of Trainspotting. It's running at 7pm until 21 Aug (not 21).
The home side is joining in too.
As part of the Film Festival,
director Lynne Ratcatcher Ramsay
an ex-boxer with an extra helping of attitude, enjoyed a degree of notoriety and some acclaim in the early-90$, but has been little heard of in these parts since moving to Phoenix, Arizona a few years back. The sometime performance artist, grave-digger, drug-dealer and shoplifter must mean something in Hungary, however, because Scallabouche Theatre Company has dug up his 1995 novel The
10 THE lIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 17—24 Aug 2000
Welsh's Ecstacy at The Venue, the place - much to the delight of the visiting North Americans - the original story is
will be talking aboutthe development of her new movie based on Alan Warner's Morvern Callar
set. An at 4pm, 22 exploration of Aug at the clubbing, Lumiere drugs and Theatre.
casual sex, the production has been picking up
(Mark Fisher)
ilNlAY ROBERTSON
Irvine Welsh's Ecstasy Canadian-style
Juicy bits Choice Festival fruit
PITY POOR MR TAPEMAN, aka Michal Nesvadba, who travelled all the way from the Czech Republic to the Fringe with ambitions to be this year's Ennio Marchetto. His act involves a huge amount of parcel tape - 1000m of the Stuff every performance - out of which he creates pictures and sculptures. But alas! Only three days into his run at Dynamic Earth, his costumes were stolen and the luckless TV star could do nothing but return home.
WE THOUGHT FILM director Lars von Trier had put the Dogme ethos behind him with his very harrowing Dancer In The Dark, starring last issue's cover star Bjork. He was part of the low- budget back-to-basics movement and, though you couldn’t accuse Dancer In The Dark of selling out to Hollywood, it's on the other end of the spectrum to Dogme. But the glitzy crowd at the opening night of the Edinburgh International Film Festival found themselves very much back to basics when a fuse blew in the Odeon. First the sound cut out, just as Bjork was at her most impassioned, then the whole cinema was plunged into darkness as the embarrassed cinema managers replaced the fuse. TWenty minutes later, normal service was resumed. Von Trier must have been chuckling.
WE WERE AMUSED to see the entire cast of Stand-Up: A P/ay About Comedy dutifully filing into the last night of Ed Byrne at the Edinburgh Playhouse. Good to see them doing such thorough research, but Our reViewer wonders if it isn’t too late.
sh: best of
IS PERRIER PRESSURE getting too much for the army of comics now resident In the city? As double acts go, the Boosh have more In common with Vic and Bob than George and Mildred, but the argument we overheard between them the other night in the Pleasance courtyard had all the signs of a domestic. Never mind, we still think they're funny.