Blood, Gore & Tears

Edinburgh, Scotland — it only lasts half an hour, it contains no words and precious little preordained action, yet I saw people leaving “Six Women Standing in Front of a White Wall,” performed by the Australian company Little dove Theatre, in tears. The women have chalk-white faces and are dressed identically in shocking-pink chiffon dresses. They shuffle head-down into position and proceed to writhe in intensely mimed anguish until at last an audience member plucks up courage to obey the prominent signs enjoining us, “Please do touch.”The day I went it was a middle-aged man who first stepped over the rope and took one of the performers by the hand. At once the woman’s painful convulsions were stilled. An expression of blissful relief and sweet childish satisfaction smoothed her contorted face. Those who subsequently stepped up to hug or stroke returned to their places looking dazed. I hung back, and I left ashamed of my own ability to resist such a direct plea for simple kindness. This is not a therapy session: the director, Chenoeh Miller, calls the show “a But-oh-inspired live artwork.” The artificiality of the spectacle — the mask-like makeup, the stylized gestures, the performers’ silence and apparent interchangeability — provides a disciplined medium for a prodigious emotional charge.* * *There’s no doubt what “Failed States” is. it’s a musical, and a very entertaining one, but its subject matter is surprisingly raw material for a show so funny. Written by Andrew Taylor and Desmond O’Connor, and directed by Patrick Wilde and heather Weir, it describes the plight of an American businessman “of Middle Eastern appearance” living in Britain with his Iranian-born fiancée. he’s arrested under the anti-terrorism laws and interrogated for weeks on end without being charged. his sanity teeters. his relationship comes close to collapsing. his trust in authority is destroyed. And all this in a show where music and spectacle are used as wittily as the words are. An interrogation is staged as a line dance, accompanied by swooping cello music and a perky keyboard solo. A gospel choir sings a cappella to protest against his unlawful detention, and a rudely honking trombone signals the breakdown of his reason. The dance moves are nifty, the lyrics full of ingenious double entendres and outrageous rhymes. The script contains an explicit reference to Josef K., but unlike Kafka, this team has chosen to make their point not by dark fantasy, but through a sequence of smartly executed hijinks.* * *Another unlikely musical is the Shalimar’s version of racine’s “Phèdre” — “La Femme Est Morte or Why I Should not F%!# My Son.” Artfully updated by Shoshona Currier, the doom-laden tragedy becomes a slick modern parable about celebrity and power. Theseus is a war veteran with a returning soldier’s ambivalence toward the loved ones he fought for, who are also the softies who stayed at home. Phaedra’s confidante is her lifestyle guru and publicist. hippolytus is a gorgeous hunk of gym-toned masculine beauty who takes on his stepfather in a briskly choreographed boxing bout and makes his final and all-too-fitting appearance as a heap of raw meat. Joey Williamson, the musical director, plays Tiresias as an androgynous snake-in-the-grass gossip writer, leading a chorus/ chorus line of hacks and paparazzi. Thehard-rocking musical numbers last too long, but the performances are polished and the script is marvelously clever. For all its glossy modernity, “La Femme Est Morte” captures the themes and moods of the Euripidean original faithfully, making a snazzy but thoughtful contribution to an ancient debate about public honor and private passion.* * *“Incarnat,” at the Aurora nova, Edinburgh’s prime venue for physical or visual theater, is at the opposite extreme of theatrical spectacle. There’s nothing ironic here. The subject is pain, and the style is powerfully direct. For the most part, we see remarkably athletic dancers, and enormous quantities of stage blood. Lia Rodrigues’s company, from rio de Janeiro, dance without any accompaniment apart from their own occasional inarticulate cries of distress and bestial yells. Their costumes begin minimally and soon become nonexistent — a great deal of this show is performed naked. The only adornments to the dance are shafts of light. At one point, a dancer chants out names of those mentors to whom their work is a tribute: Caravaggio is among them, and the dramatic chiaroscuro of the lighting plot owes much to his art.At the side of the performance space, dancers wash themselves with slow, gravely beautiful movements, a necessary operation because as each one takes his or her turn in the center of the action it is to smear on yet more blood. A tall man crushes a bladder full of red fluid against the nape of his neck, which abruptly cloaks him in blood. A woman anoints herself with gore. Another flip-flops across the stage on her back, slithering over a spreading pool of redness. A pair of dancers, loping wolflike on all fours, tear strips of blood-soaked cloth from a prone woman’s belly with their teeth. These are horrific images, but they are gorgeous too. The bodies, so richly lit, are magnificent, and every now and then they fall still in a pose of grand solemnity. This is the choreographic equivalent of a religious painting of a martyrdom or of the Passion.* * *The best of the student productions in Edinburgh tend to be those based on a strong text. The Young Pleasance Company presented an elegantly lucid adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “doctor Faustus” and The Jacobins put on an impressively assured version of Georg Büchner’s “Danton’s Death.” Edmund Digby-Jones, as Danton, gave a performance with as much punch to it as any I saw by a professional actor on the Fringe, and he was ably supported by Daniel Grant Smith as Saint-Just.Ms. Hughes-Hallett is the author of “Heroes: A History of Hero-Worship” (Knopf/Perennial).

Blood, Gore & Tears

Blood, Gore & Tears

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