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The
Edinburgh Fringe
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Fringe 1997 Reviews (4)The Traverse Theatre Company Strange, strange play! It's actually a revival, having premiered at the Traverse in 1995 and then transferred to the Bush in London for a sell-out season. A tale of love and language is how the Fringe brochure describes David Harrower's play, and the Guardian called the original production "astonishing". My description?
To an extent it's all of these, and yet it's none. The setting is a rural community somewhere in Scotland (although it could be anywhere) in or around the 17th century (or any almost any other time, save now, really). I trust I make myself obscure! That's not a joke, for this is a very disorientating piece, one of those plays it is impossible to describe. All you can do is point to it and say it is what it is! The disorientation begins right from the start. "I am not a field" the Young Woman says. The Ploughman protests that he didn't say she was: he said she was like a field. But she is not like anything, she replies: she is herself. He argues that it's like saying the moon is like cheese. She turns it round: that means cheese is like the moon. Her cheese isn't; it's like cheese! So, yes, there's humour there, the humour which arises when an innocent questions the assumptions we all take for granted, adding a further dimension of disorientation. Does this review sound bitty? unfocused? Yes? Right, let's give it some focus: The playing is uniformly excellent, as one would expect from an experienced cast, although I have to say that Pauline Knowles as the young woman particularly stood out for me. The set, though apparently simple initially, is cleverly devised and very flexible. The lighting is subtle and technically precise. But the play itself? I can only say that it fails, for me, to get its five stars because it didn't punch me in the gut. But it did leave me puzzling for days. I'm going to have to see it again, or read it. Both, probably. The Traverse Theatre Company At the end of Mike Cullen's Anna Weiss, the woman next to me and I, total strangers, sank back in our seats, looked at each other, and gasped "Wow!". From the stunned silence which reigned even as the lights came up for the curtain call, I suspect the entire almost full house felt the same. Anna Weiss, a hypnotherapist specialising in the recovery of "lost" memories, has assisted 20-year old Lynn to "remember" a long history of sexual abuse in childhood by her father. But are these memories real? or are they suggestions planted, either deliberately or unconsciously, by the hypnotherapist? In some ways it is rather reminiscent of Mamet's Oleanna: there's the same uncertainty over whose version of events we should believe, the same suspicions about possible manipulation, although here we see the potential maniupulator, Anna Weiss herself, unlike in Mamet's piece, where "the group" are shadowy, behind-the-sceens figures. Unlike Oleanna, however, the young girl who is the battleground is also a protagonist. It is clear from the outset that Anna is driven by hatred of men: ...a man, any man, looks at a woman, what does he see? A hole to be filled. And that's it. And it doesn't matter what age the woman is, the old woman in the post office queue drawing her pension - used to be a hole to be filled, the young girl in the baby swing in the park - will be a hole to be filled... David, by his own admission, was never the best of fathers. That that I was selfish, maybe, sometimes, sometimes even cruel... Cullen leaves us to decide. Lynn believes implicitly in her list of abuses: David is equally insistent that nothing of the sort ever took place. Cullen gives us no clue as to which of them we shoudl believe, and the shocking climax merely piles perplexity upon perplexity. Highly recommended! In fact, I rather suspect this Anna Weiss will be my Best of the Fringe!
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