Rubbish on the streets, not on the stage. Excitement arrived unpredictably during my 2022 Edfest: not from blasts of new work but from adaptation and revisitings.
I did not skip into A Little Life, Ivo van Hove’s stage version of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel. Though its plot follows the lives of four New Yorkers, its central subject is abuse and self-abuse: it pivots on the plight of one of the men, who, violently assaulted by priests and the non-godly, cannot trust enough to be intimate – and cuts himself to take charge of his pain. Van Hove’s adaptation is four hours long and in Dutch (with surtitles). I was sceptical about the director’s idea that he was adapting not a book but “an excess”. What does that mean? Why should fiction’s remit be narrowed? Does turning a volume into an abstraction allow it to float above examination?
Yet the experience vaulted over his description. The production has a basilisk power. Stripping down Yanagihara’s 700-plus pages, focusing entirely on the most opaque but quivering of her characters, Van Hove triumphantly shows how damage can enter the DNA.
There is no pulling back from the horrors: razor blades may be too small to be seen even from the stalls; not so the glittering bangles of blood they produce. Yet physical blatancy is threaded with inward suggestion: the evening opens with a murmur of Schubert’s Erlkönig, its wild tale of a boy tugged between father and seductive slayer a reminder that Yanagihara has spoken of fairy story as inspiration.
All the attackers are played – with impressive, sinister loom – by Hans Kesting. As the central figure, Ramsey Nasr is like a creature irradiated but trapped by dazzle. Each assault leaves him covered with another bloodied smear: we are seeing his version of himself, not the “magician of concealment” his friends think him. Everything is both palpable and elusive. Jan Versweyveld’s design carves out areas – a surgical bed, an artist’s studio – in front of a street-life video that occasionally fizzes with static. This is also the whiffiest stage since Jerusalem: Nasr may be lifted across the stage as if from the cross, but the smell in the stalls is not of sanctity but of turpentine.
It is more than 20 years since Liz Lochhead’s Scots Medea first burned into me at the festival. Then, Maureen Beattie seared across the stage. In Michael Boyd’s powerful new production, Adura Onashile is imperious and serpentine, trailing her hand across a servant’s chest as she begs a favour.
Tom Piper’s design is a bare copper box, burnished but beginning to rust. The detail is in the beat of Lochhead’s explosive, alliterative verse. Described as “after Euripides”, the drama is spiked with added human incident. Medea meets her rival: as Glauke, Alana Jackson simpers in blue satin, while all around women are in sombre black and grey. No gods tug things along: Lochhead’s play, which spits at male bullies, is about personal treachery and revenge.
No production has persuaded me that Medea was really compelled to kill her children, but Boyd and Lochhead come near to making the ferocity of the early action seem the engine of murder. Medea, eviscerated by betrayal, is urged to anger by a chorus who, mingling with the audience, cluster around her, holding down her arms as if to stop her soaring away like a kite. That’s to say, a bird of prey.
Alongside Medea in 2000, I reviewed the adventurous Grid Iron theatre company. Everyone at the festival and on the fringe has cause to thank these site-specific explorers, not only for lighting up Edinburgh’s playgrounds and department stores with their stories, but for excavating a new venue – the Underbelly. Yet though their latest promenade performance creates a series of vivid hot spots, Muster Station: Leith is swamped by its story of the climate crisis and displacement.
The audience move through Leith Academy, as observers and participants. The Great Wave is coming; all over the un-United Kingdom the young are jumping to their deaths; people are grabbing the last places in boats. A gym becomes a clearing station, with checkpoints at which everyone is quizzed about what they most value. I think I lied when I priggishly, stumblingly announced “truthfulness”, and was shamed by others who unhesitatingly declared: “my grandchildren”. A quiz about Finland – the escapees’ chosen destination – takes place in a library.
In the best scene, a youthful menage a trois floats in an inflatable dinghy in a swimming pool. Gently steaming on the sides, the audience hear the kids’ exchanges through headphones: at first larking and loving, they become engulfed by disaster; videos of grey waves rear alongside the baby-blue pool. This is the most naturally acted scene in Ben Harrison’s production, in which performances are often too histrionic to feel like documentary. It is also the scene in which the audience are most interestingly positioned: let into the action without being forcefully co-opted; given a hint of what it is to be both implicated and powerless.
Detention Dialogues, produced by ice&fire Actors for Human Rights, delivers the refugee experience directly. In what is quiet narration rather than performance, four actors read the words of actual asylum seekers, men and women who have been held in the Dungavel immigration removal centre and elsewhere, their lives suspended indefinitely, sometimes after years in the UK, always after harshness at their birthplaces. “Detained”, as an audience member pointed out forcefully in a post-show Q&A, is a euphemism for “imprisoned”; uncertainty turns out also be a euphemism – for torture.
The accounts are plain and frank: of the woman who escapes life as a servant, hit by the man of the house, by jumping on a bus and appealing to a passenger; of the couple who, threatened by relatives in Pakistan, find that once their savings are all spent their solicitor fails to get witness statements translated from Urdu. Two BSL signers also sit on the platform: more than usually prominent – and more than usually expressive as they respond to each other; another circle of empathy.
These refugee voices are a further Edinburgh echo. In that same Medea/ Grid Iron column I reviewed Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman, about an asylum seeker. So 22 years later, tales of displaced people and of bullying leaders are still dominant. Does this mean the festival has got stuck? No: surely that the world has.
Star ratings (out of five)
A Little Life ★★★★
Medea ★★★★
Muster Station: Leith ★★★
Detention Dialogues ★★★
