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| Edinburgh : A&E : Theatre: Reviews |
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Theatre listings > A Brief History of Time
- World Premiere Once again the Tramway plays host to a show in which you spend a fair proportion of your time winding your way through various normally unused corners of the building. This time, the company responsible is Vanishing Point and this voyage is a hunt for the answers to … well ..everything. Taking as a starting point, Steven Hawking's A brief History of Time the company attempt, as they put it in the programme to 'embrace the challenge of developing a theatrical 'lateral exploration' of the book and its contents. Restricting the audience to a mere 12 creates an intimate ambience, and the science starts gently with a man in a tux talking to us about the historical perspectives on science - a helter skelter ride through to Einstein and relativity and finishing outdoors under the stars, before he sends us off to our next encounter. From there we meet someone I assume is Newton, a video installation, a superbly delivered comic interlude by Robert Jack as the White Rabbit arguing about the reversibility of time with a glove puppet Alice. The next encounter is a magician, showing us tricks and giving us whisky, before we're led one by one into a completely dark space to listen to theories about the universe. Ending up in the church next door to the Tramway where we listen to a scientist talk about understanding the mind of god. Individually the episodes are mostly entertaining or diverting, and as experiences many are different, or unusual; pleasant spaces to contemplate and ponder. However as a whole it is unsatisfying - it provides neither enough science to feel that one understands more, nor a striking poetic vision addressing the ideas at an aesthetic level. Somewhere between all these lovely little images the company lives up to its name and the point vanishes. In some senses this is just a problem with the content - too much, or maybe the show is simply too small, still needing further development to connect the many scenes, or at least to connect the audience with these scenes. However maybe there is a bigger problem. Einstein, that most quotable
of scientists, once said, 'The most incomprehensible thing about the world
is that it is comprehensible.' And therein lies the difference. Einstein
and the scientific community addresses the universe with a desire to understand.
Vanishing Point often seems happy to wonder at the extraordinariness of
it all without a real passion for giving it sense. And without this drive
for meaning we are stuck as voyeurs, rather than engaged participants. Theatre listings >>
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