Theatre reviews: The Table | Lyceum at Home on Stage
The Table is an impressive collaboration between Curious Seed dance company, Lyra in Craigmillar, and the ground-breaking Lung Ha company, writes Joyce McMillan
Lyceum at Home on Stage, Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★
Access and inclusion are important ideas, in the 21st century arts world; and here are two summer shows, from leading Edinburgh companies, that approach those issues in fascinatingly different ways.
In The Table, an impressive large-scale collaboration between Curious Seed dance company, Lyra in Craigmillar, and the ground-breaking Lung Ha company which works with adults with learning difficulties, the preoccupation with access shapes whole piece, devised by Curious Seed’s Christine Devaney with the company.
The Table, we’re told, is “a bold new intergenerational production that questions who gets a seat at the table – who’s been invited, and who gets to make the invitations.” And for a gorgeous and questioning 75 minutes, driven by a beautiful musical score performed live by composer-pianist David Paul Jones with percussionist Shea Martin, the 33-strong company – 20 Lung Ha members, seven children from the Lyra Young Company, three professional dancers, a BSL interpreter, and two onstage support workers – use dance, movement, voice-over text, and the occasional humorous dramatic interlude, to explore both the many ways in which human beings can bar and exclude one another, and – most strikingly – the sheer joy and exhilaration of those moments when we discover the huge, transformative thrill of moving, acting and dancing together, across every kind of barrier.
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Crucial to the success of the show is the wonderful open space created for the performance by designer Karen Tennant, backed by a huge, bright screen that offers images from blue-sky evocations of happiness to an exploration of table imagery through the paintings of old masters. But there’s no doubt that the stars of this show are the ever more impressive Lung Ha Company, who move and interact, in this extraordinary production by Christine Devaney, Maria Oller and Jo Timmins, with a meticulously-choreographed assurance and grace that is all their own; to become part of a whole that is charged with meaning about how we should be living together, and radiant with the sense of joy and purpose visibly shared by all the performers, no matter how they were invited, or why they chose to stay.
At the Lyceum, meanwhile, audiences over the weekend were able to catch up, in a single evening, with all four of the short Lyceum At Home plays that have been appearing in the living rooms of more than 30 volunteer hosts all across the city, over the past week. An outreach project with an impeccable artistic pedigree, Lyceum At Home was co-ordinated by Zinnie Harris, and featured 30-minute plays by top Edinburgh writers Stephen Greenhorn, Isla Cowan, Apphia Campbell and Alexander McCall Smith.
Oddly, though, every one of the four plays – except perhaps Greenhorn’s opening piece Dylan’s Big Day, cleverly set in the time-frame of a vital mobile phone re-charge – seemed a shade too long, as if lost somewhere between a 15 minute snapshot and a one-act play; and Ryan Hunter, Katrina Allen, and Natali McCleary, performing the first three plays, all seemed to struggle a little with the pacing, despite some wonderfully vivid moments.
The exception, though, was Graham Mackay Bruce’s beautiful performance, directed by Ben Harrison, of Alexander McCall Smith’s closing play Love Letter To A City, an ecstatic and deeply sentimental tribute to Edinburgh performed with a gentle, elegiac passion that was cheered to the echo by the Lyceum audience.
The theme of Edinburgh’s special magic – also expressed through litanies of Lothian bus routes in Dylan’s Big Day, through all the extremes of over-tourism in Isla Cowan’s The Sights, and through the eyes of a troubled, Instagram-addicted American visitor in Apphia Campbell’s Loved Too Hard – recurred with remarkable intensity throughout the evening; and if it remains to be seen whether Lyceum At Home had any real impact in reaching out to a wider audience, it nonetheless unleashed an unexpected passion for the city among four of its leading writers, in ways that were moving, varied, and fascinating.
Both shows, runs completed.
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