Various venues, Edinburgh, August 2009

Spaceman

AFTER THE major success of Dogstar’s The Tailor of Inverness in last year’s Fringe, it was disappointing to find little Highland content in any of the many Edinburgh festivals this August, with the predictable exception of the Acoustic Music Centre at St Bride’s.

The Arches, taking over St Stephens from Aurora Nova, included Huntly’s Dudendance company performing Spaceman, a strange, haunting vision of a dance work. On a dimly lit stage, a lone figure moved painfully slowly – slow motion is physically demanding in the extreme – initially clad in a full length dress and bonnet with more than a whiff of the pioneers-o in a thousand old westerns.

Shedding the dress, the dancer became various lifeforms – a very convincing ape which metamorphosed into all manner of strange, alien creatures – with considerable facility. Back projections and an audio collage of birdsong, dogs barking, and NASA recordings helped to create the kind of other-worldly dreamscape which tangles itself into the brain forever.

Gordonstoun School’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Edinburgh College of Art promised well, with a likeable young cast brimming with enthusiasm, costumes loaned by the RSC, and a sprightly musical score mostly based on Burt Bacharach.

Kiki Michopoulou played Helena as a young Emma Thompson, Alexander Macphail’s Oberon could have been a young Michael Hutchence, and there was good direction of movement throughout, but to overrun by 15 minutes in a shared venue was unfair on both the audience and the next company.

Frank, co-written by Mull’s A.R Cox, at the Royal College of Surgeons also sounded promising – Frank Sinatra as as a Faustian figure in thrall to a mafioso Mephistopheles – but oh dear, pastiches of quintessential Sinatra tunes like ‘A Very Good Year’, ‘One For My Baby’ and ‘My Way’, set to an uninspired piano backing track fell a loooooong way short of the real thing.

Ol’ Blue Eyes’ classic back catalogue is as essential to the telling of his story as are the extraordinary dramatis personae from JFK and Sam Giancana to Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe; without it, the energetic cast’s performance failed to mesh.

© Jennie Macfie, 2009

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