4 Edinburgh International Festival shows with master storytelling

The National

a day ago

It is in this context that the extraordinary theatre production Tom At The Farm (Pleasance at EICC, until August 24) emerged. An adaptation of Quebecois writer Michel Marc Bouchard's play of the same name, the piece relocates the drama from Quebec to a place that is abstract and unnamed, but where the sensibilities are recognisably Brazilian.
Adapted by actor-writer Armando Babaioff and director Rodrigo Portella, and presented by Cena Brasil Internacional, the piece (which is performed in Brazilian Portuguese with English surtitles) has received richly deserved international plaudits since it premiered in 2017. Indeed, if there is a better piece of theatre on this year's Fringe, I have yet to see it.
The astonishing Babaioff takes on the title role of Tom, a young, gay professional from the big city whose lover, 25-year-old Guillaume, has died in a car accident. Arriving in the countryside for Guillaume's funeral, Tom goes to the dairy farm owned by the deceased man's family.
Here he encounters Guillaume's older brother, Francis, a man who – in Iano Salomão's remarkable, multi-layered performance – hides his profound crisis of masculinity behind a veneer of appalling brutishness. Francis makes it menacingly clear that Tom is to hide his relationship with Guillaume from the family matriarch, Agathe (Denise Del Vecchio), who continues to believe the longstanding lie that her city-dwelling son had a long-term girlfriend who speaks no Portuguese.
In the play that ensues, Tom's grief combines in complex, sometimes disturbing ways with his relations with both Francis and Agathe. The cosmopolitan protagonist is beguiled by his first encounters with the land and with farm animals.
The recounting of a past event, in which Francis sought to ensure that his brother's homosexuality remained hidden, has the horrifying veracity of a Greek tragedy. Director Portella's stage – an expansive, largely empty space on which the actors perform amid increasing quantities of red soil and water – is brilliantly (and disquietingly) visceral and symbolic.
Played by a universally superb cast (which includes Camila Nhary as the mythical girlfriend, 'Hellen'), boasting wonderfully atmospheric use of music, sound and lighting, this production is unforgettably powerful. Indeed, it is a work that would have been more than worthy of inclusion in the programme of the Edinburgh International Festival (EIF).
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Another outstanding stage work that is on the EIF programme is Mary, Queen Of Scots (Festival Theatre, ends today; then touring until October 18). The latest offering from Scottish Ballet, the piece is co-created by choreographer Sophie Laplane and director James Bonas, with an astonishing original score by New York-based composers Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson.
At the outset, we see the striking image of the older Queen Elizabeth I (danced by the extraordinary Charlotta Öfverholm), unwigged, undressed and exposed to the snow. She is exposed, too, to her memories of the regicide she ordered against her own cousin, Mary Stuart.
It is a moment of such aesthetic boldness and originality that one knows instinctively that the ballet to come is going to be something extremely special. So it proves to be as the well-worn story of Mary's tempestuous life and momentous death is unfurled in choreography, music and extraordinary design (by Soutra Gilmour) that are simultaneously breathtakingly audacious and perfectly complementary.
Roseanna Leney – who dances Mary in a fabulous black velvet dress – embodies the Scottish queen with, by turns, great sensuality, joy, fear, defiance and, ultimately, dignity. The conflicting and dangerous passions of the relations between Mary, her second husband, Lord Darnley (the excellent Evan Loudon) and the Italian courtier David Rizzio (the equally impressive Javier Andreu) are depicted in movement that is, paradoxically, both gorgeous and raw.
The work plays out in the constant presence of both Öfverholm's older Elizabeth and the pot-stirring, fluorescent green-clad Jester (who is given a magnificently spritely and sinister performance by Kayla-Maree Tarantolo). In a masterstroke of decidedly un-Trumpian, cross-gender casting, the younger Elizabeth is played by Harvey Littlefield, who captures the grandeur, the vulnerability and, ultimately, the anguished uncertainty of the 'Virgin Queen'.
The story is told in choreography and design that delight and surprise in their constantly inventive, highly stylised representations both of Renaissance fashions and modern ballet. For example, Mary's nemesis – Elizabeth's influential spymaster Francis Walsingham (Thomas Edwards on terrifying form) – commands a small army of sinister, fly-headed minions.
Gilmour's beautiful-yet-utilitarian sets are primed to host memorably effective shadows and projections (by Anouar Brissel). In particular, the ingenious and menacing appearance of a giant spider is bleakly premonitory.
In Karlsson and Atkinson's glorious musical score, Mary's finest hours are partnered by beautiful, energetic music that is carried along by the sound of distinctly Scottish fiddles. Other moments are magnificently cinematic, evoking, by turns, the dramatic momentum of Michael Nyman and the swirling energy of Philip Glass.
The music – which is played marvellously by the orchestra under conductor Martin Yates – is a perfectly integrated part of this ballet. However, such is its brilliance, that one leaves the theatre wanting to hear it again.
This is a truly triumphant, world-class ballet and one that – in its depiction of the Mary, Queen of Scots story – deserves to take its place alongside Schiller's great play and Donizetti's famous opera.
We move from a political cataclysm in Scottish and English history to our current age of catastrophe in Khalid Abdalla's Nowhere (Traverse, until August 24). An actor, filmmaker, producer, political activist and, now, theatre creator, Abdalla, who was born in Glasgow, self-defines as Scots-Egyptian (he spent his early life in Scotland – including, he shows us, at least one occasion on which he wore a kilt – before moving to England).
The son and grandson of Egyptian political dissidents, he was in Egypt during the revolution of 2011. His self-recorded footage from, and reflections upon, those historic events forms the foundation of the show.
Abdalla is a master storyteller, integrating memoir, documentary theatre and, latterly, emotive, hard-worn polemic. His narration is assisted by projected film and images. Often, and with surprising effectiveness, he displays printed photographs and mobile phone film clips by way of the decidedly analogue technology of an old overhead projector (coincidentally, a machine that is utilised elsewhere on this year's Fringe, in the fine biographical play MILES. at the Summerhall venue).
The artist relates his personal experience of casual, anti-Arab racism on a London street and his casting in movies (including as 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah in United 93 and Dodi Fayed in The Crown). This autobiographical testimony is interwoven compellingly with the disastrous political history of western (particularly British and French) imperialism in the Middle East.
If this sounds like a memoir-cum-lecture, that is because, in many ways, it is. However, it is done with such personal charm, humour, sincerity and performativity (including moments of music, dance and song) that one is thoroughly engrossed.
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Abdalla's complex-yet-accessible narrative leads us, with depressing inevitability, to the broken world we inhabit today and, particularly, to the ongoing and unforgivable genocide in Gaza. When, in his closing monologue, he speaks – with tremendous passion, humanity and good sense – to this gargantuan, current-day disaster, he has more than earned the right to do so.
Finally to The Nature Of Forgetting (Pleasance Courtyard, until August 23), a work of physical theatre by English company Theatre Re which, sadly, does not deliver on its significant promise. Contemplating the situation of Tom, a 55-year-old man suffering with early onset dementia, this piece seemed bound to evoke the deep personal agony (both for the sufferer and his loved ones) and the vividness of the man's long-term memory.
It succeeds abundantly where the latter is concerned, depicting his school days, his first love and life-changing moments, such as the conception and birth of his beloved daughter. All of this is done with tremendous colour, energy and physical dexterity.
The movement is accompanied by excellently well-played, intelligently theatrical music and sound. However, the piece fails to get to the emotional heart of its subject in a way that, for instance, Ramesh Meyyappan's remarkable Love Beyond succeeds in doing.
The problem is that – for all their abundant ability as physical theatre artists – the company has opted to make things easy for themselves and their audience in emotional terms. Aside from brief moments of discordant sound and visible distress on Tom's part, the show barely gets to grips with the nature and repercussions of dementia.
The company prefers, instead, to go for softer options, such as – for prolonged sections of the show – the dubious comedy of adults playing school children. At times the music reflects this kind theatrical soft soaping, not least when it sounds like Phil Collins-era Genesis.
This is an accomplished piece in performative terms, for sure, but one that fails to hit the emotional mark.