Review by Mark Fisher
The Accidental Death Of An Accordionist
6 Aug 2008 in Dance & Drama, Highland, Music
Acoustic Music Centre, St Bride’s Centre, Edinburgh, until 23 August 2008, and touring until 20 September 2008
he Accidential Death of an Accordionist (photo - Euan Martin)
TEN YEARS ago a show came to the Edinburgh Fringe called Bingo. Created in the Netherlands, it featured a band of seedy charlatans who tried to distract the audience with offers of food, cheap watches, back rubs and quickie divorces. The audience, meanwhile, was more concerned with keeping up with a genuine game of bingo and a weird dramatic tension developed as the show went on.
I’m reminded of this situationist joke when a willing audience leaps up from the cabaret-style tables to join in a ceilidh in The Accidental Death of an Accordionist. A couple of dances in and there are dodgy goings on in the Glengirnie Hall, meaning the audience really can’t decide whether to keep on with the Strip the Willow or settle back into its conventional role of a passive audience.
I can’t think of a play that has used the ceilidh format so successfully since John McGrath’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil – although the National Theatre of Scotland’s Gobbo had something of the same free-form feel. The audience gets the sensation of being a true part of a village hall event, encouraged by the second-rate raffle prizes and the caricatured Highland locals.
The production – a collaboration between Right Lines and Mull Theatre that has been proving a hit since 2001 – establishes a feelgood vibe from the start, making half the fun the audience themselves.
Despite my evoking the name of the late McGrath, there is little in the script by Euan Martin and Dave Smith that could be considered political. Yes, there’s some local tension between the laird with his time-share plan and the local eco-activists with their alternative ideas, but at heart, this is a daft murder mystery that would fall apart under any serious analysis. Indeed, it’s the daftness that is part of the charm, making it feel like you’ve fallen into a cartoon ceilidh in which everything is a little more heightened than in real life.
The result, in Mark Saunders’ production, is a joyful, silly and funny evening fuelled by a ceilidh-comedy-whodunit hybrid (plus shadow puppets) quite unlike anything you’ve experienced before.
© Mark Fisher, 2008
