Theatre review: Quiz Show, Traverse Edinburgh

IT’S now, or it’s sometime back then, in the 1980s; and we’re in a television studio, or we’re in some kind of secular limbo between celebrity heaven and emotional hell.

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Over the years, there will doubtless be many plays written about the shadow that now hangs over some of the best-loved names in British mass entertainment, as we come to know how the power of celebrity was routinely abused, while thousands turned a blind eye.

It’s unlikely, though, that any of them will pack a stronger and more disturbing punch than Rob Drummond’s Quiz Show, now playing at the Traverse as the first production of the theatre’s 50th anniversary spring season.

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The show begins in a quiz-show studio, where three nervous contestants gather under the chairmanship of star presenter Daniel. We, the obediently applauding audience, are complicit in the spectacle, the floor manager, Gerry, points out; as the Quiz Show begins, turns nasty, and then suddenly swerves into a spectacular and troubling dream-landscape, through which we gradually begin to understand the play’s original quiz-show metaphor.

In a brief review, there’s no disentangling all the layers of this strange and stirring piece of 21st-century theatre, which uses dance and word-play, memory and dreams, set-piece send-ups and frantic action to explore how our needy complicity with the cult of celebrity weakens us, both as potential victims and as necessary witnesses.

What’s undeniable, though, is that Hamish Pirie’s production features a stunning central performance from Eileen Walsh as the contestant, Sandra, backed by equally brilliant work from the rest of the five-strong cast.

And although the play occasionally seems almost too bold in its shape-shifting to
hold together, it is thrilling
to see a first full-length play which works so relentlessly
and brilliantly on the consciousness of the audience, taking us on a journey – into the immediate past of our society and its possible futures – from which we cannot return unchanged.