Lorna Irvine finds much to like in a production that, like life itself, is inconsistent.
A lone man who looks a little like Alasdair Grey bumbles into a rehearsal space. Not the set-up for a joke, but the introduction to NTGent and Les Ballets C de la B's audacious production for the Edinburgh International festival. The man, his face the very picture of clownish sorrow, plays a tape and waits, waits, and waits some more to crash a pair of cymbals together.
It's a slightly bouffon way to start the show, but then Ghent-born directors Frank Van Laecke and Alain Platel are known for their iconoclastic, slightly shocking approach to theatre, dance and performance. It's with that in mind that this show is not easy to categorise—multilingual and ridiculous, passionate and moving. The brass band itself is a composite of Belgian musicians and the Dalkeith and Monktonhall Brass Band, who play a gorgeous, elegiac selection, including Elgar and Dvorak.
As the musicians, headed up by composer musical director Steven Prengels, file in, they are the frame from which to build a fragmentary story of love, mortality and thwarted ambition. The bumbling man, played by Wim Opbrouk 'railing against the dying of the light' as he faces throat cancer is the soloist of sorts, striking out on his own with increasingly eccentric behaviour, such as spraying tea into the mouth of his partner, sleeping with the trombone he can no longer play, gargling tunes and interviewing the Scottish musicians, one by one. Meanwhile, two ageing majorettes (Griet Debacker and Chris Thys, the latter the bumbling man's partner) flirt, sashay in gold lame and, in one instance, Debacker makes out with a younger man from the band on the floor. It's kind of life-affirming to see older women playing as dirty as the men.
There are fine visual gags too—the set by Luc Goedertier has a brilliant functionality, a cardboard cut-out style, burnt-orange house as if drawn by a gifted child. The hollowed out window spaces are hugely effective, particularly when the majorettes split up, march in different levels and look as though they have been sliced in two by a magician.
To sate the dance fans, Hendrik Lebon pulls incredible shapes, and leaps like a gazelle towards the end, as all hell breaks loose in the rehearsal room for one last time.
Sure, the show may be inconsistent, maddening and a bit self-indulgent in its surrealist moments—but so is life. We just want the chance to bang our cymbals like Wim Opbrouck as the music swells—that shot at a last crescendo.
After all, life is no rehearsal.
At the Kings Theatre, Edinburgh. Part of the Edinburgh International Festival
www.eif.co.uk
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