Emperor's clothes
Lloyd Evans
The Last Night of Mankind Royal Lyceum Theatre The Seagull King's Theatre The Wicker Woman Pleasance Cavern Mystifying. What on earth possessed the directors of the Edinburgh International Festival to open their theatre bill with The Last Night of Mankind? This drearily 'apocalyptic' piece by the Argentine collective El Periferico de Objetos consists of five naked actors writhing around in a pool of mud pretending to rape each other. Their poo-soaked gymnastics are accompanied by vacuous accordion music and an occasional mockprofundity (e.g., 'one word does not respond to the other) bellowed out in Spanish by a man whose labouring pharynx would make the death-throes of a halalslaughtered donkey sound pleasing.
The aim of this senseless pantomime is no doubt to remind us of life's brutality, of the world's suffering, and of the corruption of man's soul, and so on. Great, but we'd spotted that already, thanks, To call this a pretentious peep-show would be to dignify it with an artistic finesse that it lacked. A peep-show gratifies the senses. This production set out simply to choke every portal of the brain with excrement. The troupe's motivating spirit is a sublime contempt for the audience, as Emilio Garcia Wehbi, the writer, himself boasts: 'We don't mind and in some way we don't care what the audience's opinion is when we produce theatre.' The good citizens of Edinburgh should revolt against this brainless insolence and lock up El Periferico de Objetos in some rank dungeon in the castle, then blast their ears night and day with readings from Teilhard de Charclin. But, no, they'd probably enjoy that. They'd start selling tickets and calling it art and getting the Observer to run enthusiastic photospreads about them.
The only consequence of this show was to make everything else at the Festival look excellent. Including The Seagull, which flapped and floundered and generally made things difficult for itself. The opening scene, set at dusk, was lit for dawn. The entire stage bore a cold, faint, electric-blue eeriness that drained every face of both contour and colour. We leaned forwards in our seats, straining to make out the actors' features as they spoke. A minor calamity, perhaps, but it occurred so early in the play as to ensure that things never recovered. Audiences are as vain and unforgiving as the proudest prima donna. They don't grant second chances lightly.
In Chekhov. atmosphere is crucial. His work is steeped in that peculiar Russian indolence which you might characterise as the claustrophobia of endless open spaces, the same torpor that Tolstoy hinted at when he defined ennui as 'the desire for desires'. Let the actors feel this aching numbness, let them force it into every joint and fibre of their beings, but never let them transfer it to the audience. If it crosses the footlights you're in trouble. And that's what happened here. When Fiona Shaw as Irina, the aging superstar, wandered into a samovar-party and exclaimed, 'What could be more boring than this?' a warm rush of laughter erupted from the house that cannot have pleased the director.
The paradox of Fiona Shaw is that she is too talented for ensemble acting. Her gift is so relaxed and natural as to make lesser talents around her look as stiff as puppets. I find her endlessly watchable and I fully expected to be dazzled. Instead I grew increasingly distracted by what she was doing — which was simply far too much. Irina is an hysterical exhibitionist, so you could argue that with her there can be no 'too much'. I'm not sure. We lack any audio-visual records of middle-class Russians in real life and we can only guess what limits of gesture and utterance they observed. But their habits of thought and dress suggest a certain restraint and formality. I'd say that even a woman having a tantrum would maintain her dignity and not descend into the full-blown hissy-fit that Fiona Shaw considered appropriate for Irina and which looked like a lazy borrowing from AbFab. lain Glen, as the anguished writer Trigorin, was more controlled, more believable and far more moving. Ile and Michael Pennington, who shone gently as Yevgeny, were the only true stars in this irksome, mannered and unsubtle production.
My pick of the festival is The Wicker Woman. I'd yawned and fidgeted my way through dozens of wonky psychodramas and misfiring satires, and when I finally found this witty and endlessly inventive comedy I felt I was drawing the very breath of life. The show parodies the Seventies cult classic, The Wicker Man, a film which itself re-tells the oldest fable in any tongue: the propitiation of the gods by human sacrifice. But there's nothing ponderous or self-referential here. Its effervescent ingenuity is enhanced by the charm of the players: Lucy Montgomery, Barunka O'Shaughnessy and James Bachman. These three writer-performers have as much charisma and assurance as any comedians you will ever see. Still in their twenties they have mastered the full repertoire of comic theatre: dialogue, narrative, mask, song, puppeteering, dance parodies, dream sequences, the lot. In its atmosphere and execution the show reminded me of Vic and Bob but there is more here than their thrusts of forced wackiness; you get a satisfying plot elaborated by a unifying intelligence. The jokes are simple, daft, self-knowing and self-mocking. In one section a character is calling for her lost lover in a gorge. Her cries come back to her in the form of an Echo (i.e., an actor offstage repeating her lines). As she becomes more distressed her shouts grow indistinct and the Echo asks, 'Could you say that again?' It's the kind of throwaway idea that would have pleased Tommy Cooper. The gags come thick and fast and the strikerate is impressive. No, perfect. Nothing fails.
As I sat there amid gales of laughter a phrase started repeating itself to me. West End hit. West End hit. And why not? This would satisfy everyone: the stand-up crowd, serious theatre fans, even families of kids, grannies and in-laws, because although this feels perfectly contemporary it lacks the coarseness that sours much live comedy. A treasure.
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