Fringe Spoken Word review: Park

The Lockdown Theatre Company have produced an imaginative, monochrome hymn to the simple pleasures to be found in an urban park

A still from Park

Spoken Word: Park ***

In a hesitant, dreamlike cameraphone black-and-white, images of a deserted Edinburgh park blur by; the stuffed-full bin, the desolately hanging flying fox, the trees and grass and open space. Over what we see, actor Sarah Magillivray reads a poetic series of descriptions of the imagined activity in this space with a smooth Scots accent.

She conjures the playing children, the frantic dog and its owner, the runner, the drinking teens, the sense of onrushing ice cream van summer. There is a beautiful, multi-generational comparison of four female walk-on characters – from small girl to elderly woman – separated by time but not by space, while the anthropomorphic gaze of the park itself observes the trails of a jet. We feel the distance between environment-bruising hurry and stillness in nature.

Park is just one instalment of an online programme created by the Lockdown Theatre Company, a DIY, post-pandemic venture by writer, director, producer and facilitator Rohan Candappa (a former advertising executive who turned his own redundancy into a 2016 Edinburgh Fringe show) and the Edinburgh setting of this piece accentuates the whole venture’s grounding in the archetypal fringe theatre experience. Those of us lucky enough to live near one have found our local parks and green spaces becoming as familiar as our homes during lockdown, and this tender 14-minute piece accentuates the sense of contemplation we have found there. David Pollock

Lockdown Theatre Company on YouTube

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