Kilmartin Glen, Mid Argyll, until 16 September 2007

Half Life (photo - NVA).

WHAT IS THIS thing called Half Life? It was a question I had for director Angus Farquhar when he was promoting this latest environmental art project for NVA and it’s a question I haven’t resolved even after spending two days exploring Kilmartin Glen, following the instructions on the Half Life map.

What I can say is that it’s an event like no other – not even the company’s extraordinary work in recent years on the Isle of Skye in The Storr and in Glen Lyon in The Path.

Where those events chaperoned audiences across the midnight landscape in controlled groups, Half Life leaves us to our own devices. We’re given a map and a book and sent off to discover 16 sites of historical or archaeological significance. We can do any number of them in any order and take as long as we like over each one.

A puzzling aspect is that the majority of the sites, such as the deserted village of Arichonan and the cup-and-ring marked rocks of Kilmichael Glassary, are no different to how you’d find them on any other day of the year. Half Life has simply co-opted what’s there already.

At seven of the locations, the company has installed sculpture and sound art, introducing spooky howls to the forest near the cup-and-ring marked stones of Ormaig, intensified natural noises to the ancient fort of Dunadd, and an installation made from an upturned tree threading through a millstone in a derelict cottage near Crinan.

This daytime experience, a mixture of muddy walks, short climbs and artistic discoveries, is complemented by a moonlight performance of a play by Thomas Legendre about the fictional Jacob Wheeler, an archaeologist balancing his obsession with Kilmartin Glen’s Neolithic past against the increasingly dysfunctional relationship he has with his wife and daughter.

Themes that we may or may not have picked up on our magical mystery tour resurface in the play as Jacob tries to make sense of the ancient rock carvings and discusses pre-Christian burial practises. Some of this feels shoe-horned in, but for the most part Legendre incorporates the material well, although the play lacks the muscle of a forward-moving drama, preferring the reflective to the dramatic.

Directed by Farquhar with Mark Murphy on a stunning set of felled trees built into the edge of the forest, the National Theatre of Scotland co-production looks and sounds fantastic. Shadowy netherworld figures mirror their human counterparts, abseiling down the trees, walking upside down or disappearing into the dark interior of the set designed by Simon Costin and James Johnson.

As Phil Supple’s striking lighting illuminates the forest, Rhodri and Angharad Davies play an otherworldly score on stringed instruments. The performances by Eric MacLennan, Christine Entwisle and Catherine Dyson have a dream-like detached quality, fitting for Legendre’s lyricism even if it makes it hard for us to connect emotionally.

So whatever else Half Life is, it is a unique experience, a category-defying amalgam of art, theatre and field trip. Much of it is expertly realised, but my uncertainty is over NVA’s laissez-faire attitude about what the event is trying to achieve and what our response should be.

If this is a “dialogue with the dead”, what is the conversation about? It is presumably about more than climbing to a hill-top fort and hearing a striking soundscape when you get there.

Entertaining though that is, it is a superficial response to the great amount of thought that has gone into the project, yet the individual artworks don’t yield anything more. The result is as invigorating as a day out in the country, but not as spiritually rich as an event with these ambitions should be.

© Mark Fisher, 2007

Links

• Half Life
• National Theatre of Scotland
• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog