ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS/THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE/YOU
ONCE SAID YES/A MACHINE TO SEE WITH/THE ADVENTURES OF WOUND MAN AND SHIRLEY
We're somewhere in the middle
of the six-hour marathon that is One Thousand And One Nights and I'm feeling a
mild sensation of panic. What's happened is that Shahrazad has been
telling a story to delay the moment when her husband Shahrayar will kill her
(it’s a tough bargain, but everything has a life-or-death urgency in this
show). I can cope with that, but then one of the characters in Shahrazad's
story starts telling a story of their own. And then in this story – if I am
keeping up correctly – a character tells yet another story.
I worry we're getting in too deep, that we won't be able to
withdraw through each level of story without losing the thread. I see exactly
what director Tim Supple means when he says these tales, although ancient,
share the same narrative blueprint as Inception, that very 21st-century
movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio has to journey into someone else's dream
within a dream within a dream and get out unscathed before the whole edifice
falls apart.
Stories and dreams fulfil similar functions and, if you
agree with David Mamet that theatre is a way of dreaming in public, then One Thousand And One Nights is the equivalent of deep,
rewarding REM sleep. It's like one of those nights when you dream you are
dreaming, when each dream seems to affect the next and, at the end of it all,
you seem to wake up changed. These are stories not dreams, but in this
production, performed with stripped-back Peter Brook-style simplicity by actors
and musicians from across the Arab world, they create the same dizzying feeling.
Like your dreams, these
stories have no censor. Lusts and anxieties have free reign. In the first ten
minutes alone, the show ticks off adultery, inter-racial orgies, mass murder,
the deflowering of virgins, even the death of an innocent bird. No suggestion
here of the anodyne tales of the Arabian Nights we grew up with as children nor
of the modesty and repression we associate with the Middle East of today. These
stories, starting with the brutal one-virgin-a-night premise, are frank,
vicious and uncompromised. They have no place for religious decorum or
bourgeois prudishness.
And like the deepest sleep,
the show reaps its rewards at the end of the night. Just as your brain brings
order to the chaos of your waking mind, resolving the seemingly irresolvable,
so One Thousand And One Nights starts with schism and ends in harmony. The
world it presents is full of snap judgments, summary executions and
heavy-handed justice. Men are possessive, corrupt and self-serving, but perhaps
it isn't misogyny alone that makes them accuse the women of being wily,
licentious and deceitful. The challenge is for the sexes to meet each other on
their own terms, not a power struggle but a marriage of equals. When finally
they reach that point after so much conflict and chaos, it is a moment of
profound satisfaction.
Stories were central also to
the week's other Edinburgh International Festival theatre production The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, this time creating an even greater impression of a
hallucinatory dream. Adapted from the 600-page novel by Haruki Murakami,
Stephen Earnhart's multi-disciplinary production took us into a David Lynchian
landscape of red velvet hotel corridors, random acts of violence, strange
meditations at the bottom of a well, agents with psychic powers and haunting
stories from Japan's military past, as it told the tale of one man's attempt to
find the wife who has left him without warning or explanation.
Where the stories of the One
Thousand And One Nights seek to bring clarity, Murakami's other-worldly tales
aim to take the reader into a metaphysical realm, a quasi-spiritual place of
symbols and coincidences where meaning is always elusive. In this world
premiere, Earnhart went a long way to finding a theatrical equivalent of this
heightened realism with a busy blend of shadow play, bunraku puppetry,
large-scale projections, live sound effects and more. Compared with Supple's
elemental approach, Earnhart's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink barrage seemed
to be compensating for the lack of a simple theatrical aesthetic, but he
did it with enough gusto to cover most of the cracks.
The Fringe, as ever, is awash
with stories, although with such a surfeit of choice, it is often novelties
that get people talking. For instance, when you tell people about doing You
Once Said Yes (and it is one of those shows that you "do" rather than
"see"), you go on about the mechanics of it, how you meet someone in
a tiny room in the Underbelly and she tells you to head down towards the
Cowgate to see what happens. Once there, you are approached by a tourist
searching for a youth hostel and before you know it, you're being whisked along
the street, then bundled into a car where you briefly become a player in a
heist until your story is rumbled and you fall into the arms of a children's
entertainer who wants you to carry her balloons up the High Street. In this
way, you are propelled through town like a human baton in a freeform relay race
until, some time later, you wind up having a drink and a song in the Captains
Bar.
Told like this, it sounds
like a great gimmick, but the reason the show by Look Left Look Right has
lasting appeal is its basis in storytelling. Cleverly staged though it is, the
show is really a series of character studies and, on your magical mystery tour,
you hear stories from a lawyer, a drifter, a gardener, a student, an
entrepreneur and so on, all of them caught up in some dilemma or figuring out
how to deal with some opportunity. Together they form a patchwork of life as it
is lived, adding depth and resonance to the thrill of an unconventional
presentation.
Blast Theory is attempting
something similar in A Machine To See With in which the solitary audience
member is guided through the streets taking instructions from a recorded voice
via mobile phone. The company wants you to feel like you are the star of your
own crime movie, the figure in close up who steps out of the crowd to rob a
bank. Actually, you feel like someone playing an entertaining, but essentially
silly game, making what you can of the instructions but never really getting
into character. There's a well executed twist in which you hook up with another
audience member, but in the end, it only emphasises how unconvincing you are as
a lead actor and how detached you are from the story.
For storytelling at its
finest, you have to get back to a regular theatre and marvel at the unassuming
craftsmanship of Chris Goode. The Adventures Of Wound Man And Shirley is
a funny and moving tale of teenage sexual yearning, made special by Goode's
combination of surreal conceit and immaculate narrative structure.
Shirley is a 14-year-old boy deeply in love with one of his
classmates; Wound Man is an unlikely superhero, modelled on a 15th
century medical engraving. His superpower is an extreme form of empathy which
is capable of helping even Shirley through unrequited love, family tragedy and
teenage angst. Goode's heartbreakingly romantic vision sends you home with a
warm and rosy glow and the pleasure of a tender tale perfectly told.
One Thousand And One Nights, Royal Lyceum, until 3
September; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, King's Theatre, run ended; You Once Said
Yes, Underbelly (Venue 61b), until 29 August; A Machine To See With, St
George's West (Venue 157), until 28 August; The Adventures Of Wound Man And
Shirley, Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33), until 29 August.
© Mark Fisher 2011
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