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Festival Review: The Divide **

Michael Cox reviews an anticipated production that throws away a promising premise.

August 2201, and the audience find themselves attending a history lesson called The Divide Lectures at a university. We are given just enough information to understand what has happened: at some point between now and 2201, a plague hit the UK (no mention of the rest of the world is given). Women were the carriers and adult men began to die. To prevent further death, society fragments—men to the north, women to the south. Clothes become far more restrictive, and a religious fervour becomes the rule of law, all overseen by The Preacher.

So begins Alan Ayckbourn’s The Divide, a two-part production getting its world premiere during this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. Ayckbourn presents here a rarity: science fiction theatre. Science fiction is about ideas, and it is here that he is most successful—he has built an intriguing society that has a great deal of potential and introduces us to characters easy to care about.

And at the lecture that begins the production, we are promised much: revolution, passion, intrigue, the unmasking of the powerful Preacher and the fall of this future society.

What we get instead is six hours of recitals from written records: journals, emails, reports and meeting minutes from the time of ‘the Divide’. Ayckbourn has a true talent for the theatrical, and it seems an utter shame that what we are served is constant character monologuing, with only snippets of drama.

Ayckbourn seems far more interested in telling a Romeo and Juliet tale that has a rather predictable outcome that takes an eon to reach. It also isn’t helped that the epilogue is a complete betrayal to the theme of gender equality, giving us an ending that doesn’t even belong in this century.

What makes The Divide most frustrating is that it manages to completely blow all of the potential it has in the beginning. It has a terrific cast that almost manage to lift the production above mediocrity—almost. There is a brilliant play buried somewhere behind its veil, and it would be nice to see that play freed from this utter pompous misfire that manages to throw away its terrific premise.

The Divide performs at the Kings Theatre in Edinburgh until August 20.

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