I have seen what we have done…Where did we go wrong? Read more …
Philosopher, David Hume and father of modern economics, Adam Smith awake in Edinburgh in the early 21st Century. To their bewilderment, joy and horror, it is a prerevolutionary world where all the knowledge they ever dreamt of is at everyone's fingertips and the utopia of a free market economy is a reality. But at what cost to the planet and to humanity?
With their fellow traveller, Eve, a Scottish everywoman, Hume and Smith embark on an extraordinary journey of enlightenment - from the concrete New Towns of Scotland's central belt, to Silicon Glen, Ecstasy and the gay clubs of Edinburgh.
The Tree of Knowledge is a wildly imaginative, hilariously funny and deeply moving new play from one of Scotland's most important playwrights. Jo Clifford was instrumental in establishing the reputation of the Traverse in the 1980s with the plays Losing Venice and Light in the Village. Jo's recent plays include an adaptation of Goethe's Faust and Every One for the Royal Lyceum Theatre. The Tree of Knowledge was commissioned by the Traverse and written while Jo was Creative Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Arriving somewhat presciently during what looks dangerously like capitalism's last gasp, Clifford's meditation starts off with an irrepressable waggishness grabbed hold of by a pop-eyed McKinven. By the end, however, it's become a slow-burning totem of universal hope in a messed-up world.
Jo Clifford's funny and wordy drama, low on action but high on discursiveness.
As the play unfolds, Clifford’s sparkling intellectual wordplay edges closer and closer to cliché and generalisation.
The result is strong, provocative and fascinating.
This is a refreshing and intense piece of theatre that should be welcomed across the Western world.
Beautfully sustained by director Ben Harrison’s fine cast of Gerry Mulgrew, Joanna Tope, and Neil McKinven; and backed by the shimmering, thoughtful undertow of David Paul Jones’s score, in a clever and wholehearted play that brings home the fierceness of the crisis of civilisation we now face, and the fragility of the world on which we have conducted our experiments in faith and freedom, for better or worse.
An unashamedly intellectual alternative to the more traditional seasonal fare currently on offer on Edinburgh’s stages, the play’s premise – that knowledge burns as brightly as any star – is just as uplifting.
A theatrical shambles.
Ultimately, oversimplification – of emotions and relationships, more than of ideas – stunts the dramatic development of a promising premise.
Interview: Jo Clifford
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Thursday December 8, 2011, until Saturday December 24, 2011. More info: www.traverse.co.uk
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