EIF Theatre and Music reviews: The Fifth Step | Fire in My Mouth | Irish Baroque Orchestra

Jack Lowden gives an outstanding performance in a hard-hitting play about alcoholism, finds Joyce McMillan in this latest round-up from the Edinburgh International Festival

Jack Lowden (l) and Sean Gilder (r) in The Fifth Step | Pic: Mihaela Bodlovic

The Fifth Step

Lyceum Theatre 

★★★★☆

David Ireland is a playwright of huge theatrical power, famous – thanks to plays including Ulster American and Cyprus Avenue – for setting up searingly tense dramatic situations, and plunging straight into the heart of them, with dialogue so fast and fierce that it sometime seems to scorch the air between the actors and the audience.

His new play, The Fifth Step – produced by the National Theatre of Scotland for the Edinburgh International Festival – begins with all the energy and panache Ireland’s fans have come to expect, as his two characters meet in the margins of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and Luka asks James to be his sponsor (his guide through the 12-step recovery process). Jack Lowden’s Luka is young, confused and vulnerable, the child of a violent marriage who has taken refuge in drink; Sean Gilder’s James is much older, a recovered alcoholic with a wife, a grown-up son, and plenty of wisdom to impart.

Even as Luka begins to benefit from James’s guidance, though – cleaning up his act, experiencing a spiritual epiphany, and even starting to attend church (although James himself is not religious) – the danger of a mentoring system that puts an imperfect human being in such a position of power over another’s life becomes ever more obvious; and the play builds relentlessly towards an explosive conclusion, in which James, in particular, is exposed as both a liar and hypocrite. 

Staged on a good-looking but strangely elaborate revolving set by Milla Clarke – which at least allows for some powerful silhouetted movement, as it rotates between scenes – The Fifth Step is stylishly directed by Finn den Hertog, with excellent menacing sound by Mark Melville; and Jack Lowden delivers an outstanding performance as Luka, morphing from a messed-up boy into a man who might just – before the final catastrophe – be able to set some sensible boundaries for himself.

In the end, The Fifth Step delivers a little less than it promises, as Ireland is seduced by his own willingness to say the unsayable into a conclusion so cynical, and so psychologically ugly, that even an actor of Sean Gilder’s experience cannot navigate it.  For most of the play’s 90 minutes, though, the dialogue is highly entertaining, often very funny, and sometimes brilliantly tense; as the pair inch their way through a psychological landscape man-trapped with all the old toxic ideas about masculinity, and deep inhibitions about loving and supportive relationships between men, that drive many of them to drink in the first place.    

Joyce McMillan                        

Until 25 August

Fire in My Mouth

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

★★★★☆

Each of the 146 singers from the National Youth Choir of Scotland and the National Girls Choir represented one of the garment workers – mostly immigrant women – who tragically died in the 1911 fire at New York’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Their heartbreaking story of poverty, deprivation and exploitation formed the core narrative for Julia Wolfe’s multimedia oratorio, Fire in My Mouth, in this moving UK premiere by the Philharmonia Orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop. 

Jeff Sugg’s lighting and video designs projected above the stage provided a mesmerising backdrop of animations and archive film footage to underpin Wolfe’s searing score. This included appropriate string effects, evoking sewing machines and needles punching through material, and the chilling click of the shears brandished aloft by the singers. They sang brilliantly, having been put through their exacting vocal paces by Chorus Director Christopher Bell, and also excelled in a range of movements that packed a powerful punch. 

Directed by Anne Kauffman, the story unfolds in four movements: Immigration, Factory, Protest and Fire, with the third the most dramatic. A constant drum beat expressed the tension between the desire to live the American dream and appalling pay and conditions which led to strikes and the horrific fire.

Susan Nickalls

Irish Baroque Orchestra

Queen’s Hall

★★★★☆

One niggle about this year’s Queen’s Hall series has been the paucity of information in the slender programme sheets. Yet that was maybe a deserving, if accidental, approach to a vibrant, if very occasionally teetering, performance by the Irish Baroque Orchestra under its affable director Peter Whelan. The musicians remained anonymous, the swaying teamwork was spectacular, and we had the benefit of Whelan’s cheeky Irish brogue to colour his spoken narrative.

It was a quirky concert reflecting the ensemble’s Dublin connection, the kind of “novelty” programme the mysterious entrepreneurial horn virtuoso “Mr Charles the Hungarian” mounted there in the 1740s, riding on the back of Handel’s London popularity. 

There was music by Mr Charles himself – a hunting-style horn duo, Chasse, played off-stage with perilous abandon. Among better-known Baroque figures were Hasse’s saucy Signore Barberini’s Minuet, Telemann’s Neapolitan (with endearing oboe d’amore), and Geminiani’s Concerto Grosso “La Folia”. The latter was flawless, slick and dynamic, imaginatively nuanced within the confines of Baroque styling. Equally fascinating was the reedy presence of the chalumeau, a diminutive but sonorous early clarinet. 

Handel’s Water Music, cast in John Walsh’s 18th century edition, provided a show-stopping finale, those hair-raising natural horns again commanding pole position.

Ken Walton

We're offering 40% off an annual digital subscription to The Scotsman, so you can enjoy a summer of amazing content for less. Checkout using promo code SUMMER40. Subscribe here.