Wednesday, 5 May 2010

If that's all there is @ the BAC

If that’s all there is, like Cheek by Jowl’s Macbeth, examines marriage through the prism of a couple's fractured psyches: their fantasies, insecurities and neuroses. But where the Declan Donellan’s Scottish tragedy is dark, regimented and threatening, the latest piece by in vogue company, Inspector Sands, is colourful, anarchic and liable to leave you with a very pleasant warm fuzzy feeling. Not to say that ITATI is saccharine or insubstantial, quite the opposite: from the alternative wedding cake made entirely of cheese, which Daniel, the groom (Ben Lewis), describes at length during his gloriously vapid wedding speech, to the onions which Frances, the bride (Lucinka Eisler), smears over her face while watching tele-novellas, the piece is flavoured with an array of tragi-comic images.

Scenes are held together more by association than narrative, but the play is loosely structured around the weeks leading up to Daniel and Frances’ wedding day. Disconcerted by his future spouse’s erratic behaviour, Daniel consults a psychologist (Giulia Innocenti) to find out what is wrong with her. Instead, he ends up revealing his own compulsive nature, as he hands over reams of pie charts and statistics describing her behaviour and past. Simultaneously, we follow Frances’ day to day at work as she tells the hapless intern (also Giulia Innocenti) to photocopy the same document individually 200 times, or steals another woman’s wedding gift on her lunch break.

Ben Lewis pushes Daniel’s dullard persona to the point of pathology; like the graphs by which he seems to live his life, his personality might have been formatted using Windows 95. At the same time, there is something inescapably familiar about the character: “nice but dull” is, by all accounts, the middle-class English male’s refuge of choice from emotional openness and availability. Straight as a poplar and almost quivering under the strain of her own anxieties, Lucinka Eisler’s is an equally fascinating creation: her yearning for melodrama stretches so far as dreaming her husband has been shot at the wedding reception. The third performance is as studied as the other two, but complements them perfectly: Giulia Innocenti knits the scenes together, switching between wise-fool psychologist and shuffling intern as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Together, the three company members present an abundance of invention in perfectly-timed comic sequences, yet their style retains a helter-skelter, homemade aesthetic.

I’ve heard Inspector Sands’ work described as “physical theatre”, but the term, apart from always sounding vacuous to me (is there such a thing as “unphysical theatre”?), sells the company short when it comes to the script. The dialogue lacks for neither pace nor wit, and a couple of the speeches build rivetingly high definition pictures (eat your heart out, Sky); and while the piece delights in non-literal escapades, the “movement-based” mantel is lightly worn.

The company are currently working on a new commission for the 2010 Edinburgh International Festival, which will be one to look out for this summer, but in the mean time we’ll have to make do with mental snapshots of a marriage made in heaven between three very talented performers.

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