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| Edinburgh : A&E : Theatre: Reviews |
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Theatre listings > Running Girl I have always been a fan of promenade performance and the use of unusual venues for theatre so it was with anticipation I arrived at the Corn Exchange last night. The immediacy of this piece is greatly enhanced by its production, Dorothy - our running girl - Kate Dickie is revealed from behind two vast projection screens on a running machine and on it she goes on her inner-city midnight run. The performance is accompanied by both video projections and live music which in this low-ceilinged venue gave an oppressive and somewhat claustrophobic atmosphere (a little too literally claustrophobic for me at times - air conditioning was not what it might have been!) That aside, the stage and crowd management exercised by the company is impressive - no mean feat considering the technical undertaking of moving both projection screens and the running machine through the audience several times during the performance. Exercise is a process of catharsis for Dorothy and the late night run we join her on is the culmination of the mother of all lost weekends. As she runs through the city trying to work where home is, and how to get there, she is confronted by a number of disparate souls all searching for the point of their existences. As a modern purgatory these characters hold up a mirror to the danger in many young modern lifestyles; the belief in our indestructibility, our inability to cope with our seeming unimportance, and the lack of direction felt by 'generation x' (as we all used to be so lovingly called) were inherent in these lost souls. Every story on stage deserved to be told but I found it impossible to emotionally engage with any of them they were ciphers than lost humans. Although performed by a talented cast, this devised piece had not quite
been pulled together in the creative stages. The lack of engagement with
Dorothy and her encounters made standing for an hour and 45 minutes rather
difficult. Nor could the audience feel as close to the action as the space
wouldn't allow it so we never got fully immersed - the Corn Exchange is
not as large a space as Tramway One. If you are interested in the use
of multimedia in performance however, this is a rare occasion of the appropriate
and complimentary use of recorded images in live performance and Angeline
Ferguson's work must be congratulated. The screens move round to give us a title sequence and then they move
away to reveal a woman, Kate Dickie, running, running easily, fluidly,
through the night. She tells us as she runs about Danny her boyfriend,
who she's left in their flat. We see him on the screen, an ordinary couple,
do a bit of this, a bit of that - high and wired at weekends, but happy
you know together. Then the screens move again to reveal the Jumper,
Robert Vesty, as he stands high up on crumbling bricks just holding
on to the railings, feeling most alive when facing death. He's just one
of the people the Running Girl encounters in her run through "the
city of the long night" when at 3 o'clock in the morning you can
do "some desperate, foolish things". Also encountered are Joy
McBrinn as the Preacher you try to tell your self is deranged but
you fear might be telling the truth and Robin Sneller as Bruno
the sharp suited, too ironical, knowing man and the all too real smashed
up Marsha, Christina Cochrane.
Theatre listings >>
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