Theatre Review: 365

Published on Sunday 24 August 2008 19:53

365 **** EDINBURGH PLAYHOUSE

FOR the third time in ten days, Edinburgh audiences find themselves confronted with a small stage army of young people, not yet 20, whose sense of self seems so disrupted and deconstructed that the task of presenting it on stage strains at the very boundaries of the art-form.

The National Theatre of Scotland's 365 is a show about 11 vulnerable young people seeking to make the transition from life in a care home to an independent existence; it boasts a script by David Harrower, choreography by the great Steve Hoggett of Black Watch fame, and a range of stunning performances from a superb young cast.

What emerges though, is not so much a play as a kind of scenic meditation on the inner journey of these youngsters, utterly dominated on the huge Playhouse stage by the beauty, the shifting shapes and the scale of Georgia McGuinness's spectacular set, exquisitely lit by Colin Grenfell.

From early scenes set in vivid fragments of a small flat, through a dream sequence in which one of the kids breaks down and transports the whole cast to a fairytale forest, Vicky Featherstone's production often reads like an installation for a big set and small human actors; and only briefly does the energy pass either to the performers or to the intermittently powerful script.

The effect could be irritating, featuring as it does transient visual effects, the cost of which could probably keep one of these youngsters in food for a year. But in fact it seems more like a brave, beautiful, complex attempt to imagine the inner landscape of a generation who have been failed by language and our old ways of structuring drama.

It is beautiful, haunting, exasperating, drenched in sadness, but also has a sweetness, and an ache for lost dreams of love that breaks the heart.

Until tonight, 7:30pm.