Language lessons

Published on Thursday 2 October 2008 20:22

CHERRY BLOSSOM **** THE BROTHERS SIZE **** TRAVERSE, EDINBURGH SIX ACTS OF LOVE *** TRON, GLASGOW

THERE'S a paradox at the heart of 21st-century theatre, and it goes something like this: language is the lifeblood of the art form and is the fact that distinguishes it from dance, music and visual art; yet language divides a world that increasingly needs to think globally. And it's because it tackles this question of language head-on, using all the available firepower of mid-scale 21st-century theatre, that the new Traverse show, Cherry Blossom – co-produced with the Teatr Polski of Bydgoszcz, Poland – is a landmark theatre event in Scotland. It's not perfect and not wholly satisfying, but is bursting with energy and with unanswered questions, both about its form and its content.

Written by Catherine Grosvenor in collaboration with director Lorne Campbell and design team Mark Grimmer and Leo Warner – who worked on the National Theatre smash hit War Horse – the show tells two stories of migration from Poland to the West. The first, based on real-life interviews gathered over the last two years, is the fictional tale of Grazyna, a 43-year-old wife and mother who migrates to a job in meat-packing factory in Edinburgh, finding both sorrow and liberation on the way. And the second story, read by the actors in a documentary style, is the factual account of what happened to a Polish migrant called Robert Dziekanski, who died under police taser fire at Toronto airport after a 12-hour ordeal of confusion and incomprehension following his arrival from Warsaw.

What matters about this show, though, is not only the story, but the manner of its telling. The action is played out on a bare stage made up of white panels that swing upwards to form myriad barriers, walls, rooms and entrances, and are lit with a blitz of images and text fragments that conjure up a powerful sense of Grazyna's journey through thousands of doors, and through a blizzard of linguistic incomprehension. The performance itself switches constantly between Polish and English, sometimes translated, sometimes not. And Campbell's superb cast – Sandy Grierson and John Kazek from Scotland, Marta Scislowicz and Malgorzata Trofimiuk from Poland – constantly switch characters among themselves, in a dazzling demonstration of how the roles of migrant and host community, power-holder and supplicant, parent and child, constantly shift.

The effect is often confusing; and 90 minutes of this intense, fragmented multi-media storytelling is probably ten minutes too much. But Cherry Blossom, which travels to Poland after its Edinburgh run, is a show to remember for its serious and passionate attempt at fully inhabiting the 21st-century world in which we live; and it boasts four superb performances, humane, committed, clever and strong.

There's no visible language barrier in young American writer Tarell Alvin McCraney's thrilling debut The Brothers Size, now given its European premiere by Bijan Sheibani's touring ATC Company of London; unless you count the one that divides McCraney's characters, with their fast-moving black street-speak, from the middle-class mainstream of American society. Set in the Deep South, the play is based on elements of Yoruba cosmology and tells a primal story of love between two brothers.

The responsible older brother, Ogun, runs a small car repair business; beloved younger brother, Oshoosi, has served a term in jail, and his happy-go-lucky attitude, and beautiful, seductive singing voice, constantly lead him into the company of his old prison friend Elegba.

The Brothers Size is one of those rare plays that combine epic weight with a real sense of contemporary engagement and a range of resonant echoes from past American literature; this is, in a sense, John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men reframed. Its style is simple, abstract, flexible, as the three characters move around a simple circle drawn in dry earth. The language is fast, dense, distinctive, lyrical, a powerful new voice from the very roots of American society; the music soars and seduces. And the impact is tremendous, not least on the young audience who cheered the show to the echo on Wednesday night.

Of Andy Arnold's latest production at the Tron Theatre, though, there is far less to say. Ioanna Anderson's Six Acts Of Love is a crushingly conventional Radio 4 Afternoon Play that has somehow wandered onstage at the Tron, to peculiarly depressing effect. The story is of middle-aged, middle-class Katherine, whose husband of 25 years has just left her for a younger woman; and of her once-glamorous mother Dorothy, who is gradually fading into the peculiar horror of progressive senile dementia.

The play deserves some respect for the clear-eyed precision and humanity with which it observes Dorothy's decline; the wonderful Una McLean gives an unforgettable performance in the role. But everything else about the play – from its clipped, implausibly aphoristic dialogue to its TV drama acting style – is about as banal and untheatrical as it could possibly be.

And the ending, featuring a foxy lesbian love-affair, is about as cheap an evasion of the tragedy at the centre of Katherine's story – the agony of older heterosexual women no longer loved by men – as you're ever likely to see on stage or anywhere else.

&149 Cherry Blossom (until 11 October) and The Brothers Size (until tomorrow) are both at the Traverse; Six Acts Of Love is at the Tron, Glasgow, until 11 October.