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Edinburgh Festival 2010
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Reviews from the Edinburgh International Festival 2010 (5)Vieux Carré The two shows that have come to the Edinburgh International Festival from New York are both highly avant garde, as much (or arguably more) concerned with form than content. As the evening opens, the stage of the Royal Lyceum has been decked out to look like a messy TV studio. There are cameras and screens littered around, as well as an actor downstage, this is Art Fliakos playing The Writer. This is the louche Vieux Carré district of New Orleans, just around the corner from the legendary Bourbon Street, in 1938 immediately before the War. We are in a boarding house, thinly fictionalised, where the young Tennessee Williams tried to make sense of his life and sexuality while hoping to become a writer. With action happening in between the various pieces of stage paraphernalia, as well as on screen, a series of sordid encounters takes place under the eye of Ellen Mills’ disapproving landlady, Mrs Wire. These involve the writer and several dying people, most of whom want to initiate him into the pleasures of homosexuality. There is a painter who loves to expose himself, the next door neighbour Jane Sparks, played by Kate Valk, who has a worthless, drunken lover, a pink-haired, black nurse and a couple of elderly women only seen on screen. This heady concoction develops into two hours of sordid hedonism, sometimes pornographic on screen and only a little less obscene in the dying flesh. The real surprise is that Williams emerged from this experience with any sanity at all. Elizabeth LeCompte’s methodology for The Wooster Group is deliberately eccentric, very much auteur’s theatre. She is happy to use her own interpretations rather than merely presenting in a naturalistic fashion what is probably not the greatest of plays anyway. At its best, this can bring insight but too often, it seems that excess is the goal, designed to wake up and offend traditionalist sensibilities. Philip Fisher
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