Michael Cox reviews A Wee Home from Home and Vieux Carre.
It’s the third weekend of the festival, and though we are now more than halfway through everything, it still kind of feels like there’s a long way to go. Crazy, but I love it.
Saturday, by choice, was a quiet day for me. I came into the city to only see two productions, both of which had little in common, save that they were both very theatrical.
A Wee Home from Home (****) is a remount of a production from over twenty years ago, and yet it feels as fresh and pertinent as any new work created this year. It combines dance, music and acting in equal quality and works as both a bittersweet lament for a long-gone past and a criticism of modern Scottish culture.
A man walks into a building and wants to enter a door. A doorman, busy reading his Daily Record and mulling over numerous football facts, keeps telling him that no one’s home and that he should try back later, making the man go on a journey around the streets and institutions of Glasgow. This prompts a discovery of the city, told through brilliant choreography and wonderful music.
The great thing about the production is its staging. Director Gerry Mulgrew has created a production that is constantly beautiful without ever looking pretty. It is an engaging production filled with emotion and hints of nostalgia.
But it is in his two performers, Michael Marra as the vocalist and pianist and Frank McConnell as choreographer and lead performer, that Mulgrew is best served. Both are equally strong and a pure pleasure to watch, with Marra’s vocals sounding like a world-weary yet wise bar singer and McConnell’s choreography striking a great balance between artistry and storytelling. Together, they tear up the stage from beginning to end and create multiple mesmerising moments.
A Wee Home from Home might have overrun by a few minutes, but it was still an absolute joy to see. I’m glad I caught it before its premature end at the Fringe.
What I’m also glad to have caught before its short run concluded was my first foray into the Edinburgh International Festival: Vieux Carre (***).
Carre is a play by Tennessee Williams that I hadn’t experienced before; truth be told, I’d be perfectly fine if I didn’t see it again. We see a writer onstage, busy typing away on his computer and speaking the lines of other characters as they join him. We soon learn that he is living in a rundown apartment complex with a bunch of social outcasts, and as the play progresses, the writer gets caught up in everyone’s life.
The play itself isn’t remarkable. It doesn’t stand nearly as tall as the plays Williams is famous for, but it is still an interesting play to see for the simple facts that: a) it is a play that Williams spent decades writing and b) it is reportedly autobiographical. Whether Williams knew people exactly like this or not isn’t quite known (personally, I hope not), but the young Williams did in fact live in poor conditions and escaped in much the same way as the writer.
What really is remarkable is how The Wooster Group have staged this production. Video monitors, wires and platforms zoom around and characters are all made so over-the-top that they become more symbolic than realistic. It all looks impressive and is performed with full gusto, but none of this can disguise the fact that Williams’ play just isn’t that great. This is certainly a fine example of style over substance.
That’s it for today. Tomorrow sees me at four productions, two Fringe and two EIF.
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