Review by Mark Fisher
David Hughes Dance – The Red Room
12 Aug 2009 in Dance & Drama
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 11 August 2009, and touring
SOMEONE SAID the problem with this piece by David Hughes Dance was it doesn’t make sense unless you know the story on which it is based. But that’s not quite right.
The Red Room (© Guy Veale)
It’s not difficult to bone up on the story. You can read Edgar Alan Poe’s gothic tale ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ in ten minutes, and it can be summarised even more succinctly. A mysterious plague has swept the land, leaving people with “scarlet stains upon the body” and compelling Prince Prospero to retreat with his court to a sealed-off castellated abbey. Six months later, to stop everyone going stir crazy, he throws a masked ball, only for tragedy to strike with the arrival of an uninvited guest – the Red Death itself.
Knowing this plot, however, gives you only the broadest of clues as to what is going on in The Red Room. The company claims the show is an adaptation, but it’s hard to work out how. This would not matter if the show were a piece of abstract dance, but it gives off a strong sense that it is trying to tell a story. What story I can’t say, even though the performances are purposeful and the scenes distinct.
In its baroque splendour, air of inward looking neurosis and repeated references to the ticking of clocks, The Red Room is certainly in the same realm as the Poe original, but the narrative line is as different as it is unfathomable.
For those of us who like the unifying coherence of a story, this is a drawback. For those who are content to savour the movement for its own sake, however, there is plenty to enjoy. Choreographer David Hughes, working with director Al Seed (who stands in valiantly for an indisposed dancer, wide-hipped dress and all), draws on classical and contemporary traditions – sometimes alternately, sometimes in combination – to create stage pictures that vary from the elegant to the dissolute.
One minute, Prospero’s court is all graceful ballet positions and formal gestures as it dances to a baroque score; the next it is lewd, carnal and full of campy sexual innuendo. It is as if the court cannot sustain order in the face of its isolation from the outside world, the corrupting hand of death taking its toll from afar by letting debauchery do its worst.
Further scenes of sex and violence follow – though it’s hard to work out who’s doing what to whom – until, unexpectedly, the show comes to an end. With a bit more clarity it could be a great production; as it is, it’s easier to admire than enjoy.
© Mark Fisher, 2009
