Theatre reviews: The Manipulate festival

Published on Wednesday 3 February 2010 18:03

1945: A PASSION **** QUARTO INTERIOR *** TRAVERSE THEATRE, EDINBURGH

IN A DARKENED Traverse Two, lit only by a couple of unquenched exit lights, an audience of 50 or so sits listening intently. Sometimes, lights flicker somewhere in the centre of the stage area. A circular shape appears, like an eclipsed earth, and then gradually darkens or burns; then light gleams on the intent face of installation artist Mischa Twitchin, as he holds a candle to a small sheet of glass on which fragmentary pieces of text are etched.

Mostly, though, our attention is on what we are hearing, the 35-minute sound installation by Twitchin and George Tomlinson which goes under the title 1945: A Passion. It's a dark meditation on the end of war, and the failure of peace; an exploration of Michel Foucault's bitter notion that peace is really only a disguised continuation of a state of war – Cold War, psychological war, hidden or unreported war. We hear voices, sounds and music, all of them remarkable. The music includes Bach's St Matthew Passion, and works by Beethoven, Glazunov, and Luigi Nono, some of them in versions recorded at the Berlin Haus Des Rundfunks in June 1945. The voices are those of Joseph Beuys, Richard Dimbleby, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Martin Heidegger and Andrei Tarkovsky; sometimes they are chopped and distorted into pure sound. And the words of TS Eliot's Four Quartets haunt the first half of the sequence, while a Paul Celan poem about the crucifixion defines the second.

The overall effect is beautiful, strange, sad and thought-provoking; a show for adults about some of the most serious stuff of history. Those qualities make 1945 a fitting postscript to the first day of this year's Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival at the Traverse, a rich, ever-changing international mix of shows, installations, films and masterclasses that runs until Saturday under the benign gaze of Traverse director Dominic Hill, who brought the festival with him when he arrived from Dundee Rep two years ago.

Earlier in the evening, a packed Traverse One has been both moved and entertained by Circolando of Portugal's Quarto Interior, a clown show about a classic male "odd couple" trying to share a house and a life. It covers more familiar ground than 1945, in a more predictable clowning style; but it swerves away from the bright nursery colours of ordinary clown-shows to root its story in the earth, wood and straw of traditional folk legend and in some remarkable folk-band music, producing a series of stunning and beautiful visual images along the way.

And as the contrast between these first two shows demonstrates, Manipulate remains – in its third year – a Festival that struggles to define itself in a single, slick description. As the festival's artistic director Simon Hart says, it's clear that it is not about traditional text-based drama. It's clear that it has an interest in puppet theatre – or "object theatre" – that aims at a consenting adult audience, rather than the traditional children's market; it's clear that it often involves the creative use of light, shadow-play and animation, and of powerful visual imagery.

But it also reserves the right – as with 1945 – to push its own boundaries into areas that are more aural than visual. Perhaps the best definition is that it's a small but growing international festival dedicated to theatre at its most sensual and imaginative; the kind that startles our senses and allows our imaginations free rein, as patches of light, or ordinary inanimate objects suddenly take on a dramatic life of their own. The Festival programme, which changes each day, also includes an acclaimed, spine-chilling marionette show from the Figurentheater of Tbingen in Germany; a rich programme of new animated films; an evening of experimental puppetry and shadow-theatre by young Scottish artists; a Spanish Fawlty Towers-style puppet comedy; and a raunchy Friday-evening show known as the Puppet Grinder Cabaret.

"Partly, the festival is about developing these art-forms in Scotland," says Hart, who also directs the Aberdeen-based Puppet Animation Scotland.

"It's an opportunity to show the best international work in puppetry, animation and visual theatre to audiences here, and it also gives our artists a chance to come together, and develop their skills and ideas.

"Beyond that, though, I do think that the festival reflects changes in the whole of our theatre culture. Partly, it's that audiences are increasingly looking for 'event theatre' – something with a really breathtaking physical and visual impact and a truly distinctive style. Our culture is also becoming more visually literate all the time; younger people now pick up visual cues at an incredibly rapid pace and their culture is intensely visual, rather than verbal. We discovered last year that 65 per cent of the audience who came to see Manipulate at the Traverse had never been there before; and since Dominic and the Traverse have given us such great support, it's good to feel that we can return the favour by bringing in a new audience."

"And then there's also the fact that people increasingly distrust language – the human talking figure – as a medium that has been devalued by the culture of compulsive advertising and spin, in both business and politics. There's the idea that words lie, whereas images tell the truth. In fact, that's not always the case and there are dangers in that way of thinking.

"I do believe, though, that there are limits to language, and that using a simple inanimate object, making it become something other than it is, is a classic way to evoke wonder and playfulness in people's minds, that childlike capacity that we lose as we grow older. Object and visual theatre is a way of getting in touch with that spirit of play again, and with the deeper emotions it can release. So I hope it's a process that gives people food for thought; but that it also helps to nourish the imagination and the emotions, and restore them to a central place in our lives."

• The Manipulate festival runs until 6 February.