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Reviews from the Edinburgh International Festival 2008 (3)
Mortal Engine
Chunky Move
Edinburgh Playhouse
**
Dance shares centre stage with technology in this innovatively conceived
piece from Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek and company Chunky
Move. Using sound and lightscapes which respond to the dancers’
bodies against a perilously upward slanted stage, shapes, shadows and
textures seem to breathe from their skin as they move across the panel,
or sometimes stand in front of sections raised to 90 degrees.
The technology, which elapses in real time in accordance to the dancers’
movements, has been used before to great acclaim in Obarzanek’s
solo piece Glow. At first it creates subtle and sometimes fascinating
effects. On the white-lit panel, an ensemble of dancers crawling towards
the centre give out a black inkblot glow: collectively they resemble
a giant insectile phantom, flashes of limb piercing the huge moving
shape. Later two dancers use their bodies as giant paint brushes to
leave snow-angel trails wherever they go. Antony Hamilton’s solo
is full of reptilian intrigue, his own limbs crossing and tangling with
the light effects as he slips across the stage.
In other instances the technology is simply invasive, and unfortunately
these passages are long. Ben Frost’s soundtrack leaves us hanging
on a deep electronic buzz for an aggressively long pause, while bright
electro-spiral drawings flash past lightning quick on the panel stage
without a dancer in sight. In other instances, the score crackles at
a discomfiting pitch. Obarzanek has said that he wants to explore the
relationship between bodies and new media but it seems here as if his
fascination with one outweighs the other.
There is a moment towards the end where two dancers duet, beautifully
bathed in a simple red gold glow. But it lasts for only a minute or
so before smoke engulfs the stage, a giant green laser takes the spotlight,
and their bodies are lost amid the machines.
Lucy Ribchester
Captain Overlord's Folly,
or The Fool's Revenge
By John Clancy
The Hub
****
This is more of a report than a review. Following a distinguished career
on the Fringe (and in New York), a year ago Clancy Productions were
the inaugural winners of The Edinburgh International Festival Award.
While Scottish playwrights such as David Greig, David Harrower and
Anthony Neilson dip between the Fringe and the EIF, there is little
interchange and this £5,000 award is intended to help bridge the
gap.
Twelve months on, John Clancy has brought over a cast for a staged
reading of his ambitious new play and the creators of the award should
be happy. Captain Overlord's Folly is both well written and highly
theatrical, indeed at times metatheatrical, while retaining the characteristic
wild trademarks of this company.
What starts as a Shavian play along Major Barbara lines takes
a Pirandello turn with the appearance of six clowns in search of an
author.
Kurt Rhoads plays the Captain, a man with a past but also a rich, beautiful
ward, Melissa Lynch's Sue. After some suitable pomposity with his pal,
Baron Waterloo Gallipoli (Dave Calvitto), we see Sue committing to the
Captain's handsome factory worker Tom (Wil Petre) the day before she
inherits on her 18th birthday.
A spanner arrives in the substantial person of Mike McShane playing
John Staine, an evil man who demands Sue's hand (not to mention body
and cash) in return for keeping an unmentioned dark secret.
So far, so derivative and intentionally so. The only mystery is why
the team of clowns keeps popping up dancing around and uttering silly
comments.
After the interval, the play deconstructs as the clowns, led by a delightfully
whacky Paul Urcioli, stage a bloody massacre and take over the plot,
observed and commented on by a trio of unintelligible professors.
This was never intended to be a full scale production and is still
in development. However, it showed great promise and one hopes that
EIF carry the project to full production in 2009.
Philip Fisher
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