Confluence, Inverness review: 'gentle but beautiful'

Confluence, Eden Court Theatre, Inverness ★★★★

Eden Court, in Inverness, is one of the most remarkable theatres in Scotland; a community hub, an arts centre with a huge mixed programme of events, a restaurant, a bar, and a beautiful building on the banks of the River Ness, in the heart of a city that has in recent years become a real Highland metropolis.

Its 50th anniversary is therefore an occasion worth celebrating; and this month, Eden Court is marking its anniversary in gentle but beautiful style, with a five-part, two-hour promenade show called Confluence, inspired by the famous speed, energy and volume of the river on which it stands.

The experience therefore starts in the cafe overlooking the river, with a brief on-screen reflection and poem written by Calum L MacLeoid and performed in English and and Gaelic by Megan Lovat; then each group of audience members sets off on a guided tour of the theatre, pausing along the way to absorb five short performances, curated by producer Susannah Armitage, that are strikingly varied in style and art-form, and yet somehow bound together by a spirit of warm humanity and shared celebration, sometimes against the odds.

READ MORE: Eden Court at 50: CEO Rebecca Holt on making the venue 'a place where risk is possible'

Our journey began in a high corridor two flights up from the cafe, where composer and violinist Anne Wood danced and played us into a room draped with soft tapestries, rugs and sofas. Co-created by Anne Wood and acclaimed Scottish-Indian tabla player, composer and percussionist Sodhi, this piece, called Resonant Ground, creates and embodies a soaring “confluence” between the deep beats and fine melodic lines of North Indian traditional music, and the rhythms of Scottish fiddle music; which gradually shade, In Wood’s magical hands, into the sounds of a small and beautiful Indian stringed instrument, the sarangi.

Then it was on to Postscript, a thoughtful and poignant dance piece, by Eden Court residents PCK Dance, which reflects on how people flow together in love, and then gradually separate again; and to Afterbirth, staged in a Victorian living room in the old Bishop’s Palace part of Eden Court.

Here, in a brave an memorable short piece, Glasgow-based musician and performer Sally Clay first uses a televised song to send up her own super-positive motto Can’t See, Can Do, then invites us in to witness the pain she experienced in her early months as a lone first-time mother, when the challenge of caring for her baby daughter, and trying to breast feed without any help sensitive to the needs of visually impaired mothers, finally defeated her, leading to a stay in hospital. She and her daughter eventually emerged from the dark time; but her show comes as a vital reminder that joining the big flow of life can be difficult, in a society still less inclusive that it sometimes imagines.

Then, with a swirl, it’s into the Bishop’s Palace chapel for An Ataireachd Ard (The High Surge), singer, writer, and performer Sally Swanson’s reflection on all that she owes to her gorgeous grandparents, Willie and Barbara Murray, in terms of the passing on of song, and of the Gaelic language itself; and finally to the second floor theatre bar, where the wonderful Steven Wren – best known to Inverness audiences as their much-loved pantomime director and Dame, but always a fine actor on stage and screen – delivers a shiveringly poignant monologue by Lewis Hetherington.

In The Entertainer, cheery barman Nigel tells the story of his life as a young gay man in the 1980s, and of his luminously happy and affectionate 40-year partnership with the man who becomes his husband.

The two, though, seem to be apart now, in ways Nigel cannot heal. And as we gradually begin to realise why, he quietly moves on upward to the next stage his journey; leaving us to return to the cafe, and to the brief farewell moment of river poetry that completes a memorable show designed to take us from birth to death and beyond, surging on through love, music, family, poetry, happiness and pain, with all the force of the river itself.

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