Tag Archives: Summerhall

SUITCASE SHOW

★★★★★

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Reviews, , , , , , , , , , , ,

SUITCASE SHOW at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★★

“takes a bunch of second hand materials of all kinds, and creates magic with them”

New Zealand Company Trick of the Light Theatre has made a career out of performing shows that leave as small an environmental footprint as possible. Suitcase Show shows how they remain true to that commitment. Everything is either second hand, or created from commonplace materials. Even the technical wizardry is economical, and designed to lessen the weight and number of personnel that had to travel to Edinburgh. As the show opens on a dimly lit stage, it’s not surprising to see a heap of battered suitcases neatly packed together. One is already opened, and inside, a record player’s turntable is slowly revolving as music plays. As more suitcases are opened, complex worlds in miniature emerge. And complex, intricate, life changing stories emerge alongside all this amazing design. But there’s an even bigger story tying these worlds together. The Traveller (Ralph McCubbin Howell) is at border control in an airport, facing a simultaneously bored and hostile baggage inspector (Hannah Smith).

What happens next is predictable enough. The baggage inspector tells the Traveller to open his suitcases. He refuses, but drops some unsettling information. Not only did The Traveller not pack them himself, he’s not even sure what’s in them. He repeatedly warns the baggage inspector that she won’t like what she finds. She doesn’t back down, even though her two colleagues are too busy playing cards to help. (They’re off stage, but we see them on video, played by Anya Tate-Manning and Richard Falkner). With one final warning, the Traveller opens a suitcase. It shows what looks like a diminutive Christmas village. With houses gradually lighting up, and a screen that shows silhouettes of tiny figures interacting inside one house. You could be forgiven for thinking that this is going to be a heart-warming Christmas story. You would be wrong.

No spoilers here, and I will only say that each suitcase reveals a different world, uniquely designed, with different performance skills to illuminate the tale. One story is told through the medium of two hands enacting the complete life story of two strangers who meet and fall in love on an airplane. Another uses shadows to tell the story of a bear, a train, and an escaping autocrat. You get the picture. What you won’t get, initially, is where this is all going, apart from the fact that it seems to be a series of loosely connected stories about traveling. And while we are being enchanted by all these suitcases and their stories, there is a more macabre drama brewing. When the Traveller’s identity is finally revealed, it will seem both offbeat, and somehow deeply appropriate. There’s also a grim video showing what happens to baggage checkers who ask too many questions. It that isn’t karma for all the times we’ve been stuck in airports going through baggage checks, I don’t know what is. I do know I won’t be asking searching questions of my fellow travellers any time soon.

Trick of the Light Theatre confirms that there is no end to the funny, quirky, deeply unsettling drama that has been emerging from New Zealand lately. And where would New Zealand films be without the extraordinary design and special effects that have revolutionized the industry? In its miniaturized, environmentally conscious way, Trick of the Light is doing something similar for theatre. Suitcase Show takes a bunch of second hand materials of all kinds, and creates magic with them. Director Hannah Smith and writer Ralph McCubbin Howell make a show from an absurdly mundane location and situation—equal parts humour and horror. But it’s the battered suitcases that reveal truths about life and death lurking in places you shouldn’t look. Then again, look you should, because every suitcase shows a story you won’t want to forget.


SUITCASE SHOW at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Summerhall – Old Lab

Reviewed on 13th August 2024

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Rebekah de Roo

 

 


SUITCASE SHOW

SUITCASE SHOW

CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL OUR REVIEWS FROM EDINBURGH 2024

 

KAFKA’S APE

★★★★★

Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Reviews, , , , , , , , , ,

KAFKA’S APE at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

★★★★★

“Kafka’s Ape is a powerful opportunity for a solo performer. Tony Bonani Miyambo takes it, and delivers”

The Noma Yini Company from Johannesburg, under the direction of Phala Ookeditse Phala, brings an extraordinary adaptation of a short story by Kafka to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and you have to put it on your “must see” list. Kafka’s Ape is a tour de force performance by actor Tony Bonani Miyambo, and he ended today’s performance in tears. I’m pretty sure we were all crying inside as well.

Kafka’s Ape is adapted from the Czech author’s 1917 short story A Report To An Academy. In it, an ape named Red Peter gives a lecture to an academy about his transformation from an animal to an “evolving man”. He describes how he was shot at, and then captured, by a group of hunters. He is placed in a cage on a ship that takes him far away from his home. Red Peter is in such excruciating discomfort in the cage that, in an effort to distract himself, he begins studying the humans around him. He knows he cannot get free from his cage; instead he looks for a more philosophical “way out” of his predicament. His way out is to imitate human behaviour so successfully that, at the time of giving his lecture, Red Peter can barely remember what it was like to be an ape. He tells us, his audience, of learning to drink alcohol; to smoke, and to wear clothes. Despite the tragedy of his situation, Red Peter is certain that “experience is not what happens to one, but what one does with what happens to one.”

The power of Tony Bonani Miyambo’s performance lies in taking these words, and showing us, in a very physical way, how Red Peter reaches this state of “evolution”. From the moment he enters the performance space in The Demonstration Room (ironically a former lecture theatre of the school of veterinary studies) at Summerhall, Miyambo focuses our attention. As Red Peter, he moves in a curious hybrid way morphing between ape and human as the situation demands. In just one example, Miyambo cleverly uses a lectern on stage to show how challenging it is for an ape with a bullet wound in his hip to pull himself upright to speak. As Red Peter does so, the process in his metamorphosis from ape to “evolving man” could hardly be made more clear. (And one is reminded of another of Kafka’s stories where the process goes the other way, from man to insect.) In Kafka’s Ape, Miyambo involves the audience right from the start. He delivers the lecture directly to us. And not just as an “evolving man.” We are inspected for fleas, as any conscientious ape would do. Are we also an audience of apes, or of “evolving men” ourselves? In true Kafkaesque form, Miyambo allows us to wonder about that, and to feel the ambiguous state that Red Peter himself is in.

Despite Red Peter’s intelligence and courage, Miyambo shows us the great tragedy in Kafka’s Ape. No longer anything quite recognizable, Red Peter is alienated from everything he left behind. He can no longer form relationships with other apes, because he is no longer one of them. He feels both shame and alienation from himself as well as others, despite being an “evolving man”. The adaptation of Kafka’s short story, with its echoes of apartheid, and the slave ships, carries added tragic meaning when performed by a black South African theatre company. This is a very moving production to watch, and to listen to.

Kafka’s Ape is a powerful opportunity for a solo performer. Tony Bonani Miyambo takes it, and delivers. See this show while you can.


KAFKA’S APE at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Summerhall – Demonstration Room

Reviewed on 11th August 2024

by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Zivanai Matangi

 

 


KAFKA’S APE

KAFKA’S APE

CLICK HERE TO SEE ALL OUR REVIEWS FROM EDINBURGH 2024