Meaning and nothingness
less interesting, but captures a sense of being trapped and not knowing where to turn.
Thoughtful and fresh, the young company’s well structured show has a subtly delivered but somewhat simple message of mental health awareness – one that is touchingly conveyed, tackling the subject with sensitivity and hope in a way that makes it an uplifting start to the day. SALLY STOTT Summerhall (Venue 26) JJJJ “It’s all a waste of time,” a boy shouts from the top of a plum tree. “In a few years you’ll all be dead.”
If you’re looking for earlymorning existential angst, Pelle Koppel’s adaptation of Janne Teller’s awardwinning novel is full of wry, humorous, self-knowing hopelessness.
With fittingly arch performances, Mikkel Reenberg and Ane Helene Hovby capture the group of young teenagers desperate to persuade their smug tree-dwelling friend, Pierre Anthon, that his cynicism is unfounded and life isn’t utterly pointless.
To do this, they start gathering all of the objects that are important to them and pile them up in a “heap of meaning”: green sandals, a bike, a pet, Jesus on a cross,
0 Delicious dialogue and fittingly arch performances bring Janne Teller’s lauded novel to life Cinderella the dog, the body of a dead child. It seems there is nothing in the world that doesn’t mean something to someone.
The more disparaging Pierre Anthon is about everything his school friends love, the more extreme the collecting becomes. Slowly, in the town sawmill, one person’s “meaning” becomes another’s depravity.
Reenberg’s and Hovby conjure up the debauched group of 20-odd characters with skilful sweeps of delicious dialogue that highlight the weird little things that they – and we all – find worth in.
Who are we without the objects and beliefs that we use to define ourselves? Are we really, as Pierre Anthon loftily claims, “nothing”? And when the “heap of meaning” is finally sold, does that make a mental illness that for too long she was ashamed of, partly to share an insight into a condition that is invisible to the naked eye and partly to promote the value of empathy and support for fellow sufferers.
The show could do with a tighter directorial eye, but it has enough honesty and charm to carry its hand-knitted aesthetic. You leave hoping she’ll be all right. MARK FISHER it “art” or worth no more than the money paid for it?
As a moveable set of wooden boxes grows to represent both everything and nothing, the transient nature of “meaning” and how it can be used to give us both human purpose and justify the most violent of acts is presented in all its thought-provoking and contradictory complexity. SALLY STOTT droning sounds from the tech box.
More a cabaret show than a theatre performance, set in the extremely cosy basement of The Street bar, our host delivers a lighthearted musical lecture on how to be “queen of our f*cking worlds”. Her character is apparently based on Irina Arkadina from Chekhov’s The Seagull, but her on-stage persona could really do with being developed beyond a punchy look and a spiky attitude.
There are some interesting insights into inequality and changing attitudes towards sexuality over history, as well as a story about growing up and finding a partner, being gay, and then not being gay, which fizzles out.
The more predictable idea that stripping is empowering is developed into an audience participation sequence that proves some people don’t want or need to do faux pole dancing to “get in touch with their sexuality”. SALLY STOTT