EIF Theatre and Music reviews: After The Silence | Rising Stars of Brass

In this latest EIF dispatch, our critics are impressed by a show about colonial and post-colonial attitudes and an outstanding performance from a brass band assembled just 36 hours earlier

After the Silence | Pic: © Andrew Perry

After The Silence

The Studio   

★★★★☆

IT’S DEMANDING business, to watch Christiane Jatahy’s remarkable show After the Silence, at The Studio this weekend; but if it requires truly Brechtian levels of thought and engagement from its audience, then it also richly repays them, in emotion, information, and unforgettable imagery.

Like Jatahy’s Comedie de Geneve production Dusk, which thrilled Edinburgh audiences last year, After the Silence is a show preoccupied with colonial and post-colonial attitudes, and how they still cling around many white-dominated western societies.

Staged on a wide, businesslike stage backed by a triptych of large screens, and furnished with a few plain desks and seats, the show therefore uses a unique blend of documentary film, music, archive footage and live performance to tell the stories of two land rights campaigners in Brazil, half a century apart, who were killed for their activism; and at first, it seems almost like a lecture or press conference delivered in Portuguese, while the audience has to race and concentrate to keep up with the English surtitles.  

Soon, though, two of the actors reveal that their characters are the wife and sister of a recently murdered campaigner; and despite the documentary style, the action becomes ever more emotionally intense, as Jatahy’s cameraman Pedro Faerstein leads us into brilliantly-shot modern footage of indigenous families, their rituals, and the village and forest where they live. 

The political story begins to interweave with narratives from a magical and horror-influenced 2019 novel, Torto Arado, by Itamar Vieira Junior. And with Jatahy’s company of three female actors, plus a male onstage musician, delivering performances of evermore strength and depth, the show ends with a message that is both profoundly feminist, and shaped by a mighty and purposeful rage against a system that gives Brazil’s black and indigenous peoples no effective rights to the land they live on and cultivate; leaving them at the mercy of any wealthy developer who wants to rip up the whole ecosphere for profit, while ensuring that anyone who gets in the way meets a violent and bloody end.

Joyce McMillan

Until 24 August

Rising Stars of Brass

The Hub

★★★★★

It was an outstanding achievement for the five young Rising Stars of Brass, who had met just 36 hours earlier, to pull together such a wide-ranging and musically demanding recital as the one that filled this intimate and resonant venue.

Starting with a lively account of Vivaldi’s Concerto No 2 for Trumpets and Strings in C Major, recast for brass, the five-person ensemble – drawn from four different music colleges – maintained the Baroque theme with Augustinian nun Raffaella Aleotta’s Four Motets, arranged by Daniel West. The treatment evoked a voice-like sonority from their instruments. It was a significant stylistic leap to the third of Russian nationalist composer Victor Ewald’s brass quintets, now established in the repertoire and among the first works of their kind. The Rising Stars rose to this complex challenge, conjuring images of a bustling marketplace bandstand.

After Stravinsky’s spicy Fanfare for a New Theatre (a brief interlude from the young quintet’s mentors) came Ave Maria for brass from Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil (op 37). The finale was a bold performance of Uruguayan composer and trombonist Enrique Crespo’s multi- genre Suite Americana No 1, which leaps from New Orleans ragtime to Brazilian bossa nova, Peruvian waltz and Mexican soul.

Simon Barrow

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