Theatre review: Power plant

Published on Friday 21 August 2009 18:55

POWER PLANT – A SOUND AND LIGHT EXPERIENCE

ASSEMBLY @ ROYAL BOTANIC GARDEN (VENUE 240)

IT FEELS strange to gather at the little North Gate of the Royal Botanic Garden as darkness falls; beyond, the garden seems silent and impenetrable. But follow the dimly-lit path up through the archway in the great hedge and down towards the palm house, and you'll find that something is stirring.

The plant houses gleam with strange flashes of light, their surfaces shadowed with giant traceries of branches; and somewhere beyond, the light explodes into smoke and flares.

It's not a new work – Power Plant was brought to the Botanics as part of the 2009 British Council showcase; it was first commissioned for the botanic garden in Oxford and was a huge hit last year in Liverpool. But it seems unlikely that it has ever been more powerfully displayed than here in Edinburgh, where the plant houses range from Victorian elegance to a slightly faded 1960s cleanness of shape and line; and where indoor and outdoor spaces can be made to merge in a way that suggests Japan as much as Scotland.

At first, the installations – by artists Mark Anderson, Anne Bean, Jony Easterby, Ulf Mark Pedersen and Kirsten Reynolds – seem to suggest something jarring, a disjunction between man and nature that makes huge trees shriek with sudden lurid light, or endure the roar of traffic and aircraft. Then gradually, there is more harmony: a press full of strawberries, or a step outside onto a terrace where cicadas chirp and great flaring organ pipes produce sudden, deep, vibrating rushes of music.

And finally there is the thoughtful nostalgia of Reynolds's 20th-century memory piece in the Temperate House. Twirling glitterballs make us see trees as we have never seen them before, more magical than any ballroom; old wind-up gramophones scratch out sounds of a gentler, less abusive age.

And along the galleries, on benches under old-fashioned standard lamps, people sit and reflect on our strange and tortured relationship with the astounding natural world around us; as this clever, beautiful and unexpected show surely intends them to do.

JOYCE MCMILLAN

Until 30 August. Today, every ten minutes 9:30-11:20pm.