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Saturday Night

Saturday Night

Vanishing Point present their latest production

Saturday Night is the darker, dreamier and more surreal companion piece to Vanishing Point’s innovative and popular show, Interiors. Read more …

Saturday Night: Going out night, fun night … or are you staying at home?

We are watching through the windows of a house, with a garden: different rooms, different people. What unfolds within is a mystery to be pieced together. Who is the young couple recently moved in? What is he doing in the bathroom? Who is that strange presence up above? And what is it that’s moving in the garden?

Saturday Night is about the environments we create for ourselves and call home, the dreams we build together, the secrets we keep from each other. It is about the creeping force of nature and the respite we find in the smallest of pleasures.

You see everything.

You hear nothing.

The clues are there.

What is your version of the story?

Saturday Night develops the fascinations of our most recent work – the acclaimed and multi-award-winning Interiors – exploring a powerfully organic combination of theatrical performance, music and video. Starting points included photographs by internationally acclaimed British artist Tom Hunter, Gregory Crewdson – renowned by his staged pictures of houses and suburbs from a crepuscular, surreal America – and In Sook Kim, who fantasises about the private universe of people who live in transparent buildings.

When we look at a photograph, we read deeply into a single image, imagining the story the photograph tells. We bring our imagination to bear upon it. Who are the protagonists? What are they doing there? Is the relationship between them friendly or dangerous? There is a mystery, which we have to solve. We are really active ‘voyeurs’, reading meaning into the intricate details and clues the image provides. When that picture starts moving, like a television programme, the component parts and their relationship to each other become less significant. No longer, it seems, are we being asked to read our own meaning into a picture. Rather, we are waiting to be shown what the picture will reveal.


The critical consensus

Lenton and his team have constructed an exquisitely realised meditation on life and death. At its most comically absurd, the juxtaposition of sound and image recalls episodes of Pink Panther. At its darkest, with predatory creatures creeping in from the wilderness and mortalities in every room, the eerie hiss of Mark Melville’s score helps make it look more like an ecologically inclined take on Roman Polanski’s psycho-drama Repulsion.

****(*)Neil Cooper, The Herald, 10/10/2011

Looking stunning on Kai Fischer’s set and performed with tremendous precision by the six-strong cast, it adds up to a production that is as captivating as it is unusual.

Mark Fisher, Northings, 10/10/2011

With its high-precision performances and commanding soundtrack, it leaves you happily lost for words.

****(*)Mark Fisher, The Guardian, 13/10/2011

Its tremendous grasp of stage poetry, combining light, music, live action and stunning visual images, is often enough to take the breath away.

****(*)Joyce McMillan, 13/10/2011

The piece has many of the typical shortcomings of devised theatre, and precious few of its advantages...a theatre production which looks fabulous while failing either to intrigue or to evoke.

Mark Brown, Sunday Herald, 16/10/2011

This piece lacks direction, lumps endless ideas shapelessly together and feels overly preoccupied with inconsequential matters.

***(*)(*)Allan Radcliffe, The List, 21/10/2011

I thought this was a spellbinding and wonderfully entertaining piece of theatre...My problem is that I'm not convinced the show 'does exactly what it says on the tin' or in this case, in the programme notes.

View from the Stalls, 24/10/2011

The result is an eruption of post-show discussion as the audience return to their own Saturday nights, animatedly trying to piece together what they have just seen – which, beyond pure entertainment, is surely the primary role of theatre.

****(*)Alexandra, TV Bomb, 31/10/2011


Features about Saturday Night

Interview: Matthew Lenton

Mark Fisher, The Scotsman, 05/10/2011

Where and when?

macrobert, Stirling from Wednesday October 19, 2011. More info: www.macrobert.org

Tramway, Glasgow from Friday October 7, 2011, until Saturday October 15, 2011. More info: www.tramway.org

Eden Court Theatre, Inverness from Wednesday October 26, 2011, until Thursday October 27, 2011. More info: www.eden-court.co.uk

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Saturday October 29, 2011, until Sunday October 30, 2011. More info: www.traverse.co.uk

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