Theatre
PREVIEW FESTIVAL A MICROFESTIVAL BY FOREST FRINGE Arches, Glasgow, Fri 16 & Sat 17 Apr Although its appearance on this coming year’s Edinburgh Fringe will be its fourth, 2009 was year zero for the Forest Fringe in many respects. Picked up on by numerous wings of the Scottish and UK press, the organisers’ commitment to new, challenging and free works won them a Herald Angel among other awards. Now the increased exposure has afforded them the opportunity to tour the Forest Fringe brand as a weekend-long ‘microfestival’ to London, Swansea, Bristol and Glasgow.
tiny bubble, a microcosm of Forest Fringe, and present it to people over one evening.’ The event runs for two days, he points out, but the
same programme will be repeated nightly. Much of what’s on offer will bridge the gap between performance art and installation, with numerous simultaneous pieces forming a coherent whole that can be explored throughout the Arches. The programme includes Tim Etchells’ poster installation, ‘one on one relationship counselling’ from artist Tania El Khoury and Temporary Autonomous Zone’s ‘bizarrely intense five-minute micro- gig, blindfolded’, among other eclectic interventions from Jenna Watt, Charlotte Jarvis and Pearson herself.
How do they think it will fare outside its natural ‘We were as surprised as anyone else by the buzz
environment? ‘That question is what’s really motivated us to do this,’ says Andy Field, co-director of Forest Fringe with Deborah Pearson. ‘The Edinburgh festivals environment is such an interesting place to be presenting work and so embracing of unusual things, so how can we attempt to keep hold of that energy and transplant it to a new location? We’re trying to create a that we picked up last year,’ says Field, ‘but we’re really excited about being able to use that for the benefit of the artists that we work with, to get them seen across the country. And beyond theatres, we want to take it to music festival, galleries, warehouse spaces – places where we might find a totally new audience for this work.’ (David Pollock)
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PREVIEW MUSICAL LES MISERABLES Playhouse, Edinburgh, Tue 20 Apr–Sat 15 May
In attempting to describe the unrivalled success of Les Misérables over the past 30 years, there’s a real risk of running out of superlatives. Claude- Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s musical based on Victor Hugo’s great novel about the struggle towards redemption of a group of characters in early 19th century France is one of the best-known and loved musicals the world over and has the added distinction of being the longest-running West End musical.
‘One of the questions I get asked all the time is why the show has been so successful,’ says John Owen-Jones, who plays the show’s central protagonist Jean Valjean as part of the London production’s 25th anniversary tour. ‘Obviously everyone loves the music, the costumes, the set design and so on, but the thing that has made it so popular is the story. It’s about love, redemption, despair, and everyone can relate to aspects of the story and the characters. In French schools, obviously, it’s studied as a set text, and I think when people come to see our show they feel like they’re getting a bit of culture as well as being entertained.’ Owen-Jones can lay claim to the title of the youngest Valjean in the show’s history (he first played the role at the age of 26) and was once voted ‘Best Ever Jean Valjean’ by fans in an online poll. ‘I’ve performed it thousands of times and I always get something different out of it,’ he says. ‘Physically and emotionally it’s a very demanding role; I’m on stage all the time and I start at full tilt. But I love the fact that I’ve got such a great role to get my teeth into.’ (Allan Radcliffe)
PREVIEW SATIRICAL COMEDY THE GOAT, OR WHO IS SYLVIA? Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Sat 17 Apr–Sat 8 May
‘It’s a drawing room comedy,’ says the Traverse Theatre’s artistic director Dominic Hill, ‘about a man who has an affair with a goat.’ This description doesn’t tell you everything you need to know of this play about the vagaries of sexuality and social acceptability, but it’s certainly the part that should grab your attention. The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? is a later work by Edward Albee, writer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, and this run at the Traverse will be the 2002 work’s premiere in Scotland.
‘It confronts taboos, but it’s funny at the same time,’ says Hill, also the director of this run. ‘It challenges the audience to imagine the unimaginable and to engage with the world in a different way. The play absolutely does that, but within a tragicomic framework.’ By making Martin, the goat-loving unfortunate at the centre of the story, a married, middle-aged architect, Albee’s play is also positioned at the eye-level of your typical middle class theatre-going audience.
‘It’s incredibly funny, incredibly witty, and there’s a real musicality to the dialogue,’ says Hill. ‘At the same time, there’s an epic nature about it. There are only four people in it, but it works like an epic Greek tragedy, and of course, the name is a reference to Shakespeare, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. There are lots of little allusions like that in there.’ It is, in other words, a play which holds a mirror up to the very people it seeks to entertain. (David Pollock)
84 THE LIST 15–29 Apr 2010
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