Maria Tarnowska's case attracted considerable public attention even among the crowded events of 1913. She has been credited as being the inspiration for Marcel Duchamps' "Nude Descending a Staircase," first exhibited in the preceding year, hence the title. The events surrounding it would undoubtedly have provided Dostoevsky with further material, had he survived so long.

This version, however, takes a more traditional path, which is perhaps its greatest mistake. The Countess Tarnowska certainly seems a character it would have been necessary to invent had she not existed; married young to a lecherous drunk with artistic pretensions, she took drugs, neglected her children and embarked on a series of affairs leading to several deaths including her own. Mad, bad and dangerous to know doesn't seem a completely unfair judgement of her.

In an attempt to be fair, however, the world she inhabited has to be taken into consideration, and here this production fails to fully deliver. it's not so much the stick-on moustaches the ladies wear when playing the men in Maria's life, as the awkward staginess which creeps in all too frequently. Admittedly the small space of Sweet City 1 gives little room for manoeuvring, but this reviewer wondered whether anyone in the company had been to an Edinburgh Fringe show in the past few years? It's of course unfair to expect every show to achieve that standards of the Traverse or other major venues, but one hopes their positive influence in terms of making different theatrical styles accessible to wider audiences would over time produce its own effect.

The sheer inventiveness of the first decade of the twentieth century slips by almost unnoticed here, apart from the presentation of a few notable paintings germane to the subject matter. These years, however, are the decade of Freud, Proust, the young James Joyce and John Maynard Keynes, in short of the birth of modernism, but there's no suggestion of this as the time of Maria Tarnowska. Biography is more than facts and illustration; it's also a sense of time and place, which this production never quite captures.

Times: Aug 1-24, 15.55

Copyright Bill Dunlop August 2008

Published on EdinburghGuide.com August 2008