A TIMELY TALE, AND A TEDIOUS ONE
MOST drama plays with time to some extent, but two shows at Edinburgh do so in particular.
H.G. Wells’s much-loved 1895 yarn about a time-travelling Victorian scientist — a Dr Who for grown-ups — is dramatised in a one-man fringe show, the story being told with terrific commitment by Stephen Cunningham.
The hero beams himself millennia into the future and finds a Thames Valley where innocents are bullied by grunting, cannibal subterraneans. Not much different from today!
Using little more than lighting and some Tardis-type noises, this production grips the imagination. Wells brilliantly envisaged the decline of intellectualism, the rotting of libraries, the dangers of moral complacency and even climate change. Ideas spit off the narrative like sparks from a welder’s torch.
The final 15 minutes add little, but the central adventure is told with keen-eyed insistence. Good stuff.
ZINNIE HARRIS’S play Meet Me At Dawn, part of the International Festival, is markedly less interesting. After a boating
accident, two women are washed ashore on a remote sandbank. We soon gather they are a couple and one of them, for all her chatter, is dead.
Her lover has been given a final day with her before — like Orpheus’s wife Eurydice of Greek myth — she is consigned to another world. Ms Harris takes this promising idea and renders it a wordy bore.
Competent acting from Neve McIntosh and Sharon DuncanBrewster do not prevent the 90 minutes indeed feeling like a day in Hades.