Edinburgh Fringe – Zoo TV review round-up – theatre

There are theatrical treats available on ZOO TV, with new shows released every day.

Loopstation is just one of many theatrical treats available on ZOO TV.

Loopstation ****

Heart of Darkness *****

Imber: You Walk Through ***

La Merda ****

There’s a stage, a woman in jeans and a jacket, a microphone, a spotlight, a high stool; and after a bit of a stand-up-comic-style introduction, she is telling us a story - very human, infinitely recognisable - about how she gets her key out of her bag, and unlocks her front door. After about three minutes, she finishes the story, ends the show, and quietly begins to take off her smart stage shoes and replace with comfortable socks and a pair of trainers; while she does this, the camera pulls back, and begins to swirl around the stage space, revealing other performers coming and going around the woman.

This is the opening of Loopstation, one of very few shows by the great Ghent-based company Ontroerend Goed that has never been seen on the Edinburgh Fringe; and it’s a measure of ZOO Venues’ increasingly important role on the Fringe that Ontroerend Goed chose the Zoo Southside venue for last year’s UK premiere of their stunningly-staged wordless show Are We Not Drawn Onward To New Era, with its palindromic title and structure - first forward through human history, then back again. Now, they have joined this year’s ZOO TV online Fringe programme with Loopstation (****); and if the show is very different, the eloquence of the minutely choreographed staging, with its everyday modern lives sliding past each other through an hour of stress, change, and occasional quiet contentment, seems, in its quiet way, as powerful as any of the company’s greatest work.

In an introduction, the company’s director Alexander Devriendt talks about how the show was originally intended as a kind of tribute to the everyday detail of things, and a meditation on how we might recover from our destructive addiction to perpetual economic growth if we were able to take more pleasure in the Zen of ordinary living; he also talks about how the experience of the pandemic has brought these small, precious details of life to the fronts of our minds. Yet there’s a melancholy to this vision, in the context of the company’s previous work, that makes it seem more like a final snapshot of a comfortable western way of life that may not be with us much longer; a sadness reinforced by Joris Blanckaert’s haunting score for unaccompanied female voices, finally fading to silence.

Loopstation is just one of many theatrical treats available on ZOO TV, with new shows released every day, and an exclusive live performance of The Boxing Baroness, by brilliant poet and Fringe star Luke Wright, promised for Saturday evening. You can also experience the rare intensity of 2012 Fringe First winner La Merda (****), a remarkable in-your-face stream of consciousness in which actress Silvia Gallerano, stark naked for an hour on a metal plinth, explores all the contemporary and historical political sh*t that passes through the mind of a young actress on the verge of a vital audition; and with writer and performer Francesca Millican Slater, in Imber: You Walk Through (***), you can take a beautiful and disturbing, if slightly soft-edged, walk around the village of Imber, on the Wiltshire Downs, now used as a training ground for British soldiers preparing for conflict in war zones across the world.

For a show that really takes western society by the throat, though, and shakes the routines pictured in Loopstation into oblivion, the one to watch is English company Imitating The Dog’s superb new vision of Joseph Conrad’sHeart of Darkness (*****), reimagined for an age when the truth of Empire can no longer be described entirely from a white point of view, however visionary and appalled. In this version, created by the company, we see five actors - three white and two black - argue over and tear apart Conrad’s text, layering it with cultural references from Gitta Sereny’s Into That Darkness, to Apocalypse Now, Frances Ford Coppola’s game-changing film version of the story.

They make the hero a woman; and perhaps even more crucially, send our heroine from her glittering, civilised home city of Kinshasa into a future Europe devastated by internecine war, where old autobahns snake through a blighted landscape of work-camps savagely policed by teenage militias. It’s a hugely powerful 21st century vision of Conrad’s familiar story; and although watching on screen doubtless cannot match its impact in a live theatre, this superb 100-minute film is still well worth viewing, for the sheer power of its thought, emotion, artistry, and magnificent ensemble work, on one of the key themes of our time.

Zoo TV continues until Saturday at https://www.zoofestival.co.uk/watch-1.

A message from the Editor:

Thank you for reading this story on our website. While I have your attention, I also have an important request to make of you.

The dramatic events of 2020 are having a major impact on many of our advertisers - and consequently the revenue we receive. We are now more reliant than ever on you taking out a digital subscription to support our journalism.

Subscribe to scotsman.com and enjoy unlimited access to Scottish news and information online and on our app. Visit https://www.scotsman.com/subscriptions now to sign up.

By supporting us, we are able to support you in providing trusted, fact-checked content for this website.

Joy Yates

Editorial Director