Edinburgh Fringe Theatre reviews: The Border | Sheol

Scotsman theatre critic Joyce McMillan on a play set in war-torn Ukraine that cuts to the heart of the debate over trans rights and an emotionally courageous piece of theatre exploring the presence of death in our world

The Border | Pic: Contributed

The Border

Pleasance EICC  (Venue 150), until 24 August

★★★★☆

Sheol

Pleasance EICC (venue 150),  until 24 August

★★★★☆

There are many shows on this year’s Fringe that touch on the bitter debate, in some western countries, over the future of trans people and their rights; but none, I think, that cuts to the heart of the matter as swiftly and poignantly as The Border, presented by the Grotowski Institute and Studio Wachowicz-Fret of Poland in a windswept tented pavilion behind the EICC.

As the show opens, a gentle face appears on screen, dressed in the battle-worn military fatigues of the Ukrainian army, and delivering a simple self-tape filmed somewhere on the front line. The soldier introduces themself as Antonina Romanova, a non-binary artist who was living in Kyiv with their husband, a fellow theatre-maker, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Antonina had already been forced to flee from their home region of Crimea when the Russians annexed it, in 2014; and so after a single night in a Kyiv bomb shelter, the couple decided they would neither flee again nor live underground, but would sign up for the Ukrainian armed forces, and fight for their freedom and way of life. 

This is the starting point for Studio Wachowicz-Fret’s beautiful  tribute to Romanova, The Border, which in a brief 45 minutes conjures up the pressures both of the war, and of the long journey towards full rights for gay, trans and non-binary people; as well as  insisting on the right of artists like Romanova to continue to be heard, even when war prevents them from fully practising their art. 

As Romanova speaks on film, stunning solo performer and theatre-maker Monika Wachowicz moves around the warehouse-like stage, unfurling the barbed wire that symbolises war and division, and setting out on the floor page after page of paper or script.  When the film finishes, she moves through a series of rituals, while her recorded voice remembers her conversations with Romanova about artistic collaboration across the Polish-Ukrainian border, now interrupted by war; she serves the audience with wine glasses that hold ash rather than wine, sets up a small altar of candles and remembrances, and embraces the condition of transition and change that defines non-binary lives by declaring “I am the border”. And in the end, she constructs an image of human beauty and vulnerability that imprints itself unforgettably on the mind; while a final candle is lit, and the audience slowly moves away, into the Edinburgh night.

In the same space, later in the evening, Wachowicz-Fret also present Sheol, a 70-minute show full of stunning visual imagery, movement and music. Sheol is the old Hebrew word for the abode of the dead, and in this show - sometimes accompanied by a pianist, a cellist, and a towering, dreadlocked trumpeter - Wachowicz uses music, including Gorecki’s elegiac 3rd symphony, as one of her tools for exploring the presence of death in our world - personal death and seating grief, environmental destruction, self-destruction, even the ever-haunting horrors of the holocaust.  

Sheol is often hard to read, and perhaps too long-drawn-out in its conclusion. Yet it leaves us aching for more theatre that reaches these soaring levels of emotional courage and sheer visual imagination; as well as of searing honesty about the depth of the crises humankind now faces, whether we choose to acknowledge them, or not.   

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