Theatre review: Lost In Music, North Edinburgh Arts Centre
Lost In Music, North Edinburgh Arts Centre ****
On a stage filled by designers Karen Tennant, Simon Wilkinson and Gavin Glover with powerful nature-imagery – festoons of leaves, a magnified pool of water – four musician-singers launch into Moore’s superb new score, while the recorded voices of young people talk about their relationship with music, and how they cannot imagine their lives without it. “Everything else just fades away,” says one. “Time kind of stops, when you’re just listening.”
The show soon moves forward, though, into a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a story which evokes both the power of music, and the danger of looking back; so that by the end, when the six young music-makers emerge from the audience to join the show, it becomes a hymn not only to the vital role of music in young people’s lives, but to the creative power of those who keep making and performing new music, aware of the past, but not defined by it.
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Hide AdMoore’s music is tremendous, as are the individual songs, co-written by the four performing musicians, Jill O’Sullivan, Alex Neilson, Clare Willoughby and Emily Phillips; and the show is bound together by Nicholas Bone’s simple and beautiful text, which tells an old story, and links it to a new one, with a depth of feeling that makes for a unique theatrical experience, as beautiful as it is moving. - Joyce McMillan
Touring to Platform, Glasgow, 6-7 March