Jake Mace
Arriving at Edinburgh’s Manipulate Festival from Latvia’s Gertrūdes Teātris Ielās (Theatre on Gertrude Street), this intimate and often obstinate piece unpacks craft, creation, destruction, ecology, and folklore in a span of eighty-five minutes that somehow feels both thematically jam-packed and curiously bare. Some will walk away from The Wood Paths fascinated, and I suspect, others quite bewildered. Monotony is a dangerous device to deploy on stage, and its entirely unclear by the closing moments of this piece where it has captured anything meaningful in its monotony.
A large printer on the corner of the stage spews out the dialogue belonging to our two main characters sparingly throughout the piece, our performers non-verbal throughout. In its opening moments, towers of wood beam backlit through a large sheet of paper, that is wheeled back to reveal a ‘forested’ area that our two performers, Rūdolfs Gediņš and Edgars Samītis, will take apart in the spirit of creating something new together.
The ensuing half an hour sees both performers hacking apart a large log each, with a curious rhythm that makes you question whether each are trying to stay in time with one another and split said log at precisely the same time. Well, in the performance I witnessed one log came down slightly earlier than the other, leading to rapturous applause around the room. The sheer physical effort involved in this piece is fascinating, and for the performers to act so fervently and impulsively without communicating between one another is deeply impressive.
With the remains of the split wood, the pair hack and drive until suitable heights and lengths have been cut to be arranged into a forest background just in front of the large paper screen. As we flitter into the darkness of the night, the printer begins to spew out more questioning thoughts from the pair about their location and their deed, though not before long we witness them pulling apart a series of pallets and rearranging them into the eponymous ‘wooden path’.
An unexpected folkloric twist descends, and the large paper screen is cut into pieces in the mess of the wood splinters that have now flooded the stage, there was some opportunity for the audience to be grabbed by a message, a rising tension, something. Alas, it becomes a more comical bent than one that seeks to pungently reflect on the ecological questions the piece raises in its very DNA.
Avant-garde performance demands much of us as an audience, especially when it spans eighty-five minutes. At the core of this piece is transformation – yet, unfortunately the piece’s own transformation from something very visceral to something conceptual feels underbaked. The show’s promotional tagline reads with the ending that “the ordinary becomes extraordinary”, when in the case of The Wood Paths it feels that the ordinary feels ordinary still, and the extraordinary remains as yet un-rendered.
A decisively stark staging and lack of frequently deployed sound design leaves the performers to struggle in the show’s culminative act, though inventive lighting choices and clever use of a drill to create sound effects in the mid-section leaves you feeling that there’s so much more to be achieved in a concept as ambitious as this one. I simply can’t imagine how they rehearsed it – which in itself adds plenty of intrigue, though initial eyebrow raises about how this piece will play out shortly gave way to indifference on my part as an observer.
Recommended Drink: Pair this with a Lumberjack cocktail – spiky whisky, zesty orange, and mellow maple.
Performances of The Wood Paths have now concluded at Manipulate Festival 2026.
Madeleine Martin
Magalie
