Theatre reviews: Arlington | A Piano Full of Feathers
A new production of Enda Walsh’s Arlington offers one of the year’s most powerful, enigmatic and challenging theatre experiences, writes Joyce McMillan
Arlington, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★★
A Piano Full Of Feathers, Perth Theatre ★★★
When Enda Walsh’s Arlington premiered in Galway in 2016, veteran critic Michael Billington hailed it as “a new form of category-defying theatre”; and it remains so nine years on, in this stunning new production by Glasgow-based dance company Shotput.
From his breakthrough 1996 hit Disco Pigs to his 2014 play Ballyturk, Enda Walsh has almost always set his plays in closed worlds, with limits conjured up in the minds of the characters themselves. In Arlington, though, he shifts his ground to a dystopian future in which the limits are imposed from above, and a young woman called Isla inhabits a bleak room in an anonymous tower block, waiting for her number to be called by an electronic ticker on the wall.
In the room, she dreams, remembers, listens to voices from a lost and more convivial world on the radio. Rob Willoughby’s powerful, glimmering video images of seashore and woodland haunt her television screen, and sometimes explode onto stage wall, like a dream of escape; Isla’s only companion is the disembodied voice of the official who monitors her, on a series of flickering screens downstage.
Isla’s number comes up, in a way that raises horrifying historical echoes; and the scene fades to black. When the light returns, we are in another dimension, where dancer Jack Anderson delivers a jagged, twitchy and riveting 30-minute solo, to a terrific, threatening soundscape by composer Cat Myers and sound designer Garry Boyle, which seems inspired by themes of confinement, struggle and survival.
And then, suddenly, we are in the final scene, where the young surveillance worker from the first scene is now confined in the room. Before he dies, the voice of a woman guardian demands his story – which turns out, surprisingly, to a be a redemptive one, of love and self-sacrifice.
Arlington is designed, of course, to raise more questions than it answers. Yet its image of world of total alienation and control, where human beings are all either “keepers” or “kept”, lingers in the mind like a warning dream. And Shotput’s production – featuring flawless performances from Aisha Goodman, Alex Austin, and the magnificent voices of Ann Louise Ross, Andy Clark, Pauline Goldsmith and Benny Young – offers one of the year’s most powerful, enigmatic and challenging theatre experiences; full of a chilling sense of danger, and of the urgent need to fight, for our messy and glorious human lives.
In such times, though, it’s hardly surprising we also seek the comfort of nostalgia; and if you fancy a gentle evening of 20th-century musical history swept along by terrific songs, then Perth Theatre’s new show A Piano Full of Feathers might be for you.
Written by Jane Livingstone and directed by April Chamberlain, it’s a 90-minute musical tribute to the great Irving Berlin, dressed up in a hopelessly over-complicated framing device, as a 20th-century version of Moneta, Roman goddess of memory, encounters a young man who is not Irving Berlin, but an embodiment of his most famous song, White Christmas. The song is appearing before Moneta to find out whether he will be remembered; and the answer, naturally, is yes. Along the way, though, Frances Thorburn as Moneta, and Ross Forbes-Mackenzie as the song, deliver an impressive tour of Irving Berlin’s magnificent playlist, from Thirties classics like Let’s Face The Music And Dance, to hits like Always and White Christmas itself, which reached their zenith during the Second World War.
Both performers sing beautifully, to musical director Hilary Brooks’s accompanying piano, in a show where the piano full of feathers becomes a symbol of Berlin’s human kindness in the face of personal and global tragedy – he filled his grand piano with feathers so New York neighbours would not be disturbed, while he worked on his great songs, far into the night.
Arlington is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 6-8 November. A Piano Full of Feathers is at Perth Theatre until 1 November.
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