EIF reviews: The Outrun | Penthesilea | La Pasión según San Marcos | Where to Begin

The stage adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s memoir is a triumph, as was the EIF’s opening concert

The Outrun, a five star adaptation of Amy Liptrot's memoir for the Edinburgh International Festival.

THEATRE

The Outrun *****

Church Hill Theatre, until 24 August

We live, so we keep telling ourselves, in stressful times; and the secret of success of Amy Liptrot’s acclaimed 2016 memoir The Outrun is the profound honesty and tremendous literary power with which she captures how that stress is written on the body, and how it may threaten to kill us.

Raised on a farm in Orkney, Liptrot yearned to leave; but after university, her new life in London spiralled down, over a decade, into an alcohol addiction so profound and hectic that it eventually robbed her of her health, of friends, and of the man she loved.

The Outrun chronicles both her memories of that life, and her experience in the year when she returned to Orkney in an effort to recover. And although Stef Smith’s new play based on the book - co-produced by the Lyceum Theatre and directed by Vicky Featherstone - is necessarily a very different piece of art from Liptrot’s deeply meditative book, it faithfully retells the tale of a return full of tensions and contradictions - not so much a story of how Orkney heals the wounds sustained in the big city, but of how a woman finds the strength, on a dark London street or a wild northern coast, to heal herself.

So on a wide stage set with a rotating shack and a few tilted platforms of various heights, Stef Smith unfolds a 105-minute sequence of scenes in which the woman - given no other name - negotiates conversations with her father, her lover, an old Orkney friend, a scientist she meets during a winter on Papay, and a woman from her London therapy group; conversations both exquisitely written in themselves, and performed with luminous clarity by a perfectly chosen cast of six, led by a dazzlingly wrecked, forlorn, charismatic and brilliant Isis Hainsworth as the woman.

And in Vicky Featherstone’s breathtakingly sure-footed and perfectly crafted production, they are supported by the powerful presence on stage of five other performer-singers - acting as chorus, dancers, living representations of the thrumming life of London and the forces of nature that sweep an increasingly vulnerable Orkney - and by the unobtrusively superb music and sound design of Luke Sutherland and Kev Murray; as well as a thrilling backdrop of moving images by Lewis den Hertog, full of the stones and surging seas of Orkney with all their huge dangers, and that mighty, life-giving power that the young woman finally begins to feel again, on the very edge of extinction, and of the unknown.

Joyce McMillan

THEATRE

Penthesilea ****

Royal Lyceum Theatre, until 6 August

Tragic love and rock music combine in International Theatre Amsterdam’s production of Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea, named for the Queen of the Amazons who falls in love with the Greek warrior Achilles, with terrible consequences.

Eline Arbo, known at EIF for her acclaimed 2022 version of The End of Eddy, directs a fierce, emotionally charged production where everything - rage, bloodlust, love, betrayal - happens at the highest intensity.

Composer and musical director Thijs van Vuure transforms the nine-strong ensemble cast into a rock band whose output ranges from throbbing metal beats to whimsical extracts from English-language pop songs. Alva Brosten’s vampish costumes and Pascal Leboucq’s minimalist set add to the sense that the ancient tale has been infused with contemporary energy.

The attraction between Penthesilea and Achilles is transgressive not only because they’re meant to be enemies but because Amazons can take as lovers only those they have defeated in battle, and only then when randomly allocated. Penthesilea’s desire to be with Achilles soon conflicts with her loyalty to her own warriors, but it’s also a profound clash of cultures: one feisty and female, the other holding tight to traditional values regarding the sexes.

It’s hard not to see the first two thirds of the production as explaining the context for the final compelling third when the lovers get together. Here, suddenly, we see Penthesilea (Ilke Paddenburg) and Achilles (Jesse Mensah) not as mythic figures or as military leaders, but as two people falling in love. All talk of battles falls away leaving a light-hearted, giddy intimacy.

But it’s all too brief. Soon, we’re hurtling towards a conclusion which leaves stage and actors soaked with blood. It’s not out of place in a production which has held nothing back, but it does tend to distract from what might be more important: the needless loss of two people in their prime.

Susan Mansfield

MUSIC

La Pasión según San Marcos *****Usher HallAs rioters in English cities sent out violent messages of division, a more embracing vision of humanity was being enacted in Saturday’s opening Usher Hall concert. Osvaldo Golijov’s La Pasión según San Marcos - a 95-minute adaptation of the Crucifixion story by a Latin-American Jew and premiered in 2000 - is a full-frontal expression of unity.

The chorus itself was a dramatically animated synthesis of Caracas’s charismatic Schola Cantorum de Venezuela (look what’s happening there!) and an incisive, fully-engaged National Youth Choir of Scotland. The Latin-American razzmatazz of the indigenous percussion-heavy Orquesta La Passion played hard and fast with the bittersweet strings and red-hot brass of the RSNO. Soloists ranged from impassioned Capoeirista Ponciano Almeida and sultry jazz singer Luciana Souza to Porto Rican operatic soprano Sophia Burgos, Afro-Cuban vocalist-dancer Reynaldo González Fernández leading the figurative dance dimension.

Musically, La Pasión is a restless melting pot - sublime religious chant colliding with heavy-duty samba, ritualised clapping or cool bossanova; a racy carnivalesque crucifixion parade and violent dissonance of Jesus’s death dissolving magically into a final Kaddish Prayer. Somehow, hip-swinging conductor Joana Carneiro gave this raw menagerie a show-stopping, heart-warming singularity of purpose.

Ken Walton

OPENING EVENT

Where To Begin ***

George Heriot’s School, until 4 August

After opening last year’s International Festival with a weekend of music in Princes Street Gardens, Nicola Benedetti opts for son et lumière spectacle this year with an ambitious large-scale expression of the festival’s theme of Rituals That Unite Us. The creative team, led by outdoor events specialists Pinwheel, includes theatre-maker Simon Sharkey, writer Davey Anderson and designer Becky Minto.

As darkness falls on Heriots’ grounds, the audience welcomed by hundreds of flaming torches. actors man installations which look like giant chemistry sets but are to do with the production of whisky (the sponsor is the Macallan after all). Volunteers are picked from the audience to lay a coal on a fire, a nod to the fact that the citizens of Edinburgh donated their coal rations to light up the city for the first festival in 1947. Coloured lights cut through smoke creating shafts of solid colour.

Having observed all this, we gather at the back of the school for the main projection which makes the facade wobble and blur, inhale and exhale. Drone footage of Edinburgh’s seven hills pitches across the building while a voice contends that the city is “one of these thin places where the other world is close”.

Then it conjures the depths of that other world, of spirits and monsters, myths and imagination, “the Hogwarts to our Heriots”. The music crescendos - Roma Yagnik’s score giving way to blasts of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Verdi’s Requiem - and the voice describes inspiration. The piece concludes with a beautiful, specially commissioned song by Karine Polwart, members of the chorus singing where they stand, mingled among the audience.

It is in details like this, rather than in flawless technical wizardry, that the magic lies. Designed to inspire wonder, to talk about where art comes from and what it does, the spectacle is too general, too broad-brush, too determined to explain the mysterious. The power of creativity is to be felt rather than understood, and it happens on a human scale. However sincere the intention, we don’t need a ritual to conjure it back. It’s here because we are.

Susan Mansfield