Best of International Theatre 2010 #2: Oneohone, ‘101’

C Soco, Edinburgh

Aug 15-30

The year is nearly over and it’s time to think back on the lessons we’ve learned. I’ll go first: I was naïve once and probably still am.

From reading this blog you may find that I often attribute a generosity or kindness to theatre, assuming it to be a considerate, well-meaning experience insofar as its audience is concerned.

There was one show this year that convinced me otherwise. There really is no other way of putting it:

101 got under my skin.    

Best of International Theatre 2010 #3: Shared Experience & Sherman Cymru, ‘Speechless’

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Aug 5-29

“I hate the life I am leading now. But why do I say leading? I do not lead my life at all. It is pulled along by an invisible string. By whom? By what? A circumstance of the past. A force. I’m just an onlooker”

– June Gibbons.

“You are Jennifer. You are me”

– Jennifer Gibbons

Edinburgh Fringe is a brilliant place to be. No where else do you quite see the spirit and possibility of theatre at its most free as when you walk down the Royal Mile, every inch of which canvassed by pamphleteers and street performers. The city turns into a vast marketplace for the month of August, with the best and worst of today’s theatre on offer. Luckily I was able to locate the former with Sherman Cymru and Shared Experience’s joint effort: Speechless.

Shared Experience are a London-based theatre company who have come to distinguish itself through a series of critically honoured literary adaptations, notably their homage to Charlote Brontë, Eyre, which received acclaim for its unison of world-class acting and text. Co-artistic director Polly Teale’s script achieved praise for reaching eloquent depths in writing about the destructive effects of retreat into imagination in adversary to isolation, an artistic feat Teale would also achieve with her company’s follow-up – a project based on Marjorie Wallace’s The Silent Twins.

Best of International Theatre 2010 #5: Ontroerend Goed, ‘Teenage Riot’

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Aug 17-28

I imagine it went something like this ...

One day a man woke up and said “I want to do a play. I want to do a play, and it will be about teenagers and performed entirely by teenagers. It could only be performed by teenagers. It will be unapologetic, chaotic, and unpredictable”.

Alexander Devriendt – artistic director of Belgian theatre entrepreneurs Ontroerend Goed – found thirteen Flemish teenagers and put together a show which became aptly known as: Once and For All We’re Gonna Tell You Who We Are So Shut Up and Listen. Devriendt (33) and his motley crew of adolescents brought the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2008 where it received critical acclaim and earned a tour to festivals all over the world. Critics especially applauded the show’s gleaming nostalgia, and its artful artifice of a universal ‘teenagedom’ realised as a realm now lost to today’s adults. Devriendt became something of champion of unheard teenagers, a Peter Pan to the Lost Boys if you will. Nestling tour dates around school holidays, Once and For All…was on the road for two years before its final performance in Ghent in April of this year. The Lost Boys had to grow up eventually, but seemingly Pan didn’t …