Published in the Guardian © Mark Fisher
Interiors
Traverse, Edinburgh
5 out of 5
Imagine watching Festen with the sound turned off. You would see family and friends gather for their celebratory meal, you would have a sense of the tensions and attractions between them, but on a dialogue basis you would be left guessing. This is the effect of Interiors, an audacious production by Glasgow's Vanishing Point - en route to the Lyric Hammersmith and the Naples Theatre festival - performed behind a glass window that turns the audience into voyeurs and the actors into characters whose actions speak louder than words.
Inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck's early symbolist play Interior, in which a visitor interrupts a family gathering with news of a daughter's death, Matthew Lenton's production is at once whimsical silent comedy and touching meditation on the transitory nature of life. What starts as a light-hearted gimmick builds into a beguiling piece of theatre that is sad, funny and heartbreakingly humane.
Its premise is simple. We are in the depths of winter in the kind of northerly country where people travel with shotguns for fear of wild animals. An elderly widower, played with exquisite tenderness by Andrew Melville, holds his annual dinner to mark the approaching spring. His guests arrive and do the things that guests do - eat, flirt, dance, joke and squabble - until it is time to fade back into the night.
We hear not a word of this apart from the wry commentary of a ghostly Elicia Daly, who stays on our side of the divide, and yet the subtext comes across more volubly than classic Chekhov. The incidents have an archetypal familiarity - exploring varying degrees of social embarrassment from thwarted teenage crush to a mid-meal nose bleed and a fated marriage proposal - yet what could have been a slight comedy of manners becomes deliciously poignant.
© Mark Fisher, 2009
Interiors
Traverse, Edinburgh
5 out of 5
Imagine watching Festen with the sound turned off. You would see family and friends gather for their celebratory meal, you would have a sense of the tensions and attractions between them, but on a dialogue basis you would be left guessing. This is the effect of Interiors, an audacious production by Glasgow's Vanishing Point - en route to the Lyric Hammersmith and the Naples Theatre festival - performed behind a glass window that turns the audience into voyeurs and the actors into characters whose actions speak louder than words.
Inspired by Maurice Maeterlinck's early symbolist play Interior, in which a visitor interrupts a family gathering with news of a daughter's death, Matthew Lenton's production is at once whimsical silent comedy and touching meditation on the transitory nature of life. What starts as a light-hearted gimmick builds into a beguiling piece of theatre that is sad, funny and heartbreakingly humane.
Its premise is simple. We are in the depths of winter in the kind of northerly country where people travel with shotguns for fear of wild animals. An elderly widower, played with exquisite tenderness by Andrew Melville, holds his annual dinner to mark the approaching spring. His guests arrive and do the things that guests do - eat, flirt, dance, joke and squabble - until it is time to fade back into the night.
We hear not a word of this apart from the wry commentary of a ghostly Elicia Daly, who stays on our side of the divide, and yet the subtext comes across more volubly than classic Chekhov. The incidents have an archetypal familiarity - exploring varying degrees of social embarrassment from thwarted teenage crush to a mid-meal nose bleed and a fated marriage proposal - yet what could have been a slight comedy of manners becomes deliciously poignant.
© Mark Fisher, 2009
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