Theatre Review: Cargo, Edinburgh Mela

Flying acrobatics over Ocean Terminal. One of the joys of the Festival period is the way it transforms Edinburgh's public spaces into other worlds. Over the years, a series of breathtaking, huge-scale outdoor extravaganzas have created fairy grottos, circles of hell or dreamscapes out of the city's functional parks and municipal courtyards for three weeks only, before order is restored and the visiting companies return to Mexico or South Korea or Poland, taking the ability to transfigure the commonplace with them.

This year, though, one of the biggest spectacles the Fringe has to offer is homegrown. Sort of. Commissioned and co-created through the Edinburgh Mela, at which it will launch, Cargo, a collaboration between some of Scotland's most exciting artists, musicians and theatre-makers, is set to turn Leith Links into a (very) watery wonderworld.

"There's quite a bit of water in the show,' says director Dougie Irvine, of children's theatre company Visible Fictions. "And as the action will be taking place in, around and above the audience, there's more than a chance they might get wet. We will be providing rain ponchos, though."

Cargo is notable not just for its scale, but its scope. It's produced by Chlo Dear's Iron/Oxide company, well known for their grand-sized productions, but as a Mela commission also needed to fulfil a diverse, multicultural remit. The 37-strong production team, all Scottish-based, have origins in 27 countries (assembling them took three months), but the story itself, conceived as a celebration of what Dear describes as "the very human, and often very positive, impulse to travel - migration in its most glorious sense", also had to appeal to the widest possible audience.

"I knew from the start that this piece had to work for a multicultural audience, some of whom might not speak fluent English," says Dear. "So we needed to find a means of telling this story, without words, in a way that wouldn't alienate anybody."

Irvine and the team have tackled these challenges by creating a whole new world. Set on an ocean somewhere - possibly not even on Earth - Cargo follows a cast of migrating characters who travel in a variety of vessels, including upturned umbrellas, searching for love and a place to call home.

"It's not socially real, our story: we've tried to create something much more mythic, something poetic, like a fairytale," says Irvine. "Actually, a number of people on the project have told me it feels quite Terry Gilliam-esque, and I, of course, am delighted at that comparison. Although they have also said Mad Max and Kevin Costner's Waterworld."

The job of creating a universally appealing language to tell the story fell to La Banda Europa's Jim Sutherland, perhaps best known to Edinburgh audiences as the composer of the bustling score which chased wannabes and comedians up and down New Town streets in Annie Griffin's 2005 film Festival.

"I'm not a fan of 'world music'," says Sutherland. "I feel as though it's a diluted version of the culture, nothing more than the sum of its parts. What we've tried to do as we make this score (his six-strong team of composers includes traditional tabla players turned Glasgow bhangra DJs Tigerstyle, Sri Lankan-born composer Niroshini Thambar and Galvarino Ceron-Carrasco and Vahe Hovanesian, from Chile and Armenia] is create something that exists for itself, a new music with real strength and integrity. We wanted to bring everything together, use the music to create this real, strange, new place with its own very distinctive culture."

Cargo isn't the only high-profile collaboration in the Mela programme this year: the Naturally Inspired strand, for instance, pairs Scottish and international musicians and storytellers, while the live music programme spans the Jaipur Brass Band to Scottish rap crew Northern Xposure. However Cargo seems to encompass the complete spirit of the Mela in one production. "We wanted to create the sort of story that might chime with long-forgotten tales from anyone's homeland," says Irvine. "The sort of world you might just half recognise from your dreams." v

The Edinburgh Mela runs from Friday until 8 August on Leith Links, with performances of Cargo at various times throughout the Festival. For further details see www.edinburgh-mela.co.uk. Cargo then continues from 11-22 August, at 9.15pm

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, August 1, 2010