Festival Theatre
THE TRIAL Disorientating, triumphant nightmare from Belt Up ●●●●●
Reader beware. The best advice I can give you is not to read a review of The Trial – this or any other – but just to book your tickets now and trust the company to deliver an amazing show.
Any review of this play is going to contain plot spoilers, and perhaps the main reason for this is that the plot itself, the trajectory of the actual script, is almost negligible once you pass through the stage door into this disorientating, triumphant nightmare.
‘You must wait. Wait to be called.’ From the back of the queue, it slowly
becomes apparent that each audience member is being ushered separately into the venue. In the darkness outside, a girl is weeping violently into a corner. At the door, a white-faced form takes you by the hand, and with a sudden swing you are inside, where there are more figures, brushing round, tugging, tying a blindfold, pressing you confusedly onward into the cavernous space where Josef K’s trial is to take place. For the next hour, you never entirely regain control of your relationship to
the actors or scenes or physical surroundings. Because the room is dark its perimeters remain indefinite, and because the black figures and white faces are constantly among us, calling to one another and to us, touching us and herding us from place to place, there is no time for taking stock. At one point my hands are taken up and I am led off on a slow, deliberate waltz through the darkness. Around us, another scene is taking place, but when the dance stops, my partner keeps hold of me, his eyes fixed on mine, warbling without pause to his fellows around the room. With hindsight, it feels melodramatic to say it was the bewildered,
helpless participation of every audience member which turned every one of us into Josef K, but it certainly felt like it at the time. (Lizzie Mitchell) ■ C Soco, 0845 260 1234, until 31 Aug, 11.20pm, £9.50–£11.50 (£8.50–£10.50).
66 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 20–27 Aug 2009
THE YEAR OF THE HORSE Frightening vision of a vacuous consumer society ●●●●●
The cartoonist Harry Horse presented a haunting, gothic vision of contemporary Britain in the Sunday Herald in the year before his tragic and early death in January 2007. These bare facts and a few more are communicated by Tam Dean Burn before he launches into a slide show of the artist’s work, reading Horse’s own text as each piece appears before us. What emerges is a frightening vision,
accompanied by Keith McIvor’s disturbing electronic score, of a vacuous consumer society, fuelled by war and brutality and reified by the bromide of affluence. Horse’s work is stunningly effective,
both beautiful and ghastly in its exploration of the blood money appropriated in the Iraq war, and the grim moral vacuum of the spectacle that masked it. For him, our culture sleeps, glutted with the smug righteousness of its media, as an environmental and moral apocalypse approaches. It’s all strikingly presented by Burn, who in a white ‘hoodie’ voices the primal rage of the artist with a theatricality that contrives to arrest you long after the show, but never overwhelms the breathtaking visuals. (Steve Cramer) ■ Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 31 Aug (not 24), 6.05pm, £10–£12 (£8– £10).
THE WORLD’S WIFE Poetry in motion ●●●●●
There are some things in life that even a suspicious Fringe audience can trust in, and Linda Marlowe interpreting the poems of Carol Ann Duffy’s best- known collection is a double gold-star guarantee of quality. Marlowe is a phenomenal performer, and the 19 utterly different women she inhabits are a very real reminder that there simply are not enough diverse roles for older actresses. She goes from coquettish, sexually charged adolescent in ‘Little Red Cap’ to feminist gangland enforcer(s) in ‘The Kray Sisters’; the splendid, short, one- joke pieces ‘Mrs Darwin’ and ‘Frau Freud’ hit the audience like
thunderbolts and leave them helpless with laughter at her slightest inflection or facial motion, and Mrs Faust reinvented as a possible Mrs Fred Goodwin leaves a well-shod Assembly audience chuckling, but slightly uncomfortable. However, it’s penultimate piece, ‘The
Devil’s Wife’, that sticks in the memory, even without the programme note that this poem is about Myra Hindley. The frightening, haunted amoral skelf Marlowe becomes as she stares out from behind a barred chair, choking out incoherent denials, ought to become one of the defining images of this year’s Fringe. (Kirstin Innes) ■ Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 31 Aug, 1.50pm, £11–£12 (£10–£11).
UNIT 46 Thin walls and solitary frustrations ●●●●●
This Australian two-hander visits the familiar territory of frustrated flat dwellers with a wrought examination of paranoid loner Tim and frustrated teacher Diane, living above and below each other in a claustrophobic unit block. Communicating only by note, broom bash, and muffled anguished retort, their neighbourly feud becomes the scapegoat for their failures in love, work and friendship.
Although this play rests on a small, domestic premise, it manages to take in an almost overwhelming array of themes. Tim struggles to overcome being laid off his job, suffers anguish over his divorce, and attempts to counter the problem of being an old fashioned guy in a whirlwind society. Similarly haunted by her desire for a partner and her increased alienation from her friends, needy 40-year-old Diane casts herself into a Chardonnay- fuelled fantasy land of myth and sex.
While at risk of attempting to deal with too much, tight direction, consummate performances from Leof Kingsford-Smith and Lucy Miller, and an ingenious use of set, deliver Unit 46 from the potential pitfall of thematic over-kill. (Rosalie Doubal) ■ C Chambers Street, 0845 260 1235, until 31 Aug, 6.45pm, £9.50–£10.50 (£8.50–£9.50).
for GLASGOW THEATRE see non-Festival magazine