Lola Rose Wood
Disclaimer: In the spirit of ‘Think Less, Feel More’, what follows is a stream of consciousness to capture the feeling of watching this show. It is therefore an extended piece to suit this expansive form.
It is really hot down here. Are the Former Women’s Locker Rooms in Summerhall smelling of fresh hot sweat or did they never stop smelling of sweat in the first place? Either way, the combined armpit smells of decades past and present form the olfactory backdrop for Bull / Fight – which feels fitting for what I am about to witness.
I have to distract myself with thoughts like this, so I don’t end up uncouthly staring at the people around me. The staging of this play is intimate. I am faced, surrounded, lined with audience and actors. Maybe it’s not intimate, maybe its confrontational. It’s an arena. A bit like, you know… they’re staging a bullfight or something, I’ll write that in the review – oh wait…
Finally as I become sure I have stared at the man opposite me a legally questionable amount of time, the actors start moving. And OH how they move, individually and collectively with astounding precision. Philomène Cheynet directs with complete confidence and control.
It doesn’t feel overly choreographed, however. There is an abstract amount of chaos to their physical storytelling. I’m watching a modern man being assembled by workers in front of me, like a car in a garage (forgive the anachronism). Our main character’s raw human material is dressed and adorned in the garlands of modernity. A suit. A suitcase. A newspaper. His hat. It’s extremely evocative.
The man being assembled is Federico García Lorca. Spanish poet and playwright, longhair, aesthete, bohemian, you know the type. The people assembling him are his theatre troupe. Or sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they’re nasty Spanish people, because it’s the 1930s and Francisco Franco is about to get nasty. Which isn’t good news for playwright-longhair-aeshete-bohemian types.
At this point I am starting to stare at the guy in front of me again. I don’t care if I go to jail. He seems more interesting. I’ve heard this story so many times, haven’t I? The tortured man-genius with the beautiful mind in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Everyone in his clique is looking up to him because he’s one of a kind and HE CAN’T STOP WRITING, HE JUST HAS TO, DOES ANYBODY HAVE ANY INK AROUND HERE?! It’s enough to give any playwright an inferiority complex. But I guess I’m not a male genius. So I’ll just feel a bit bored and annoyed.
Lorca lectures us about beauty and love and fear. Which he describes as a bull. In a bull fight. This is what the show is about then: fear. Fear of the fascists coming. Fear of your neighbours. Fear of how you might react? I can smell the sweat of centuries. And I’m staring at my neighbours.
Maybe this is cleverer than I instinctively gave it credit for.
Finally the fascists come. And they imprison Lorca and shoot him. Now the audience is left without their iconic main character. And so is the cast.
But this isn’t the end. This is where it really picks up.
This it where it really moves. And OH how it moves. When the actors stop being Spanish subjects and morph back into a big blob of raw human material, Bull / Fight transforms from the slighly Am-Dram-ish into the sublime.
We follow the ensemble as a synchronously moving caravan of the damned as they drag themselves through the wastelands of war and destruction. Harrowing poetry is recited as this body mass assembles and disassembles again.
I am terrified. This is great. How would I react? How do I react to my fears?
Would I fight the bull?
The beauty of this question is that it answers itself. Or rather, in an applaudable feat of physical theatre, Mythography Collective make you answer it for yourself. Because they brought the bull with them. And when it literally forms out of the humans you have watched on stage this entire time, you’re mortified.
And you want to fight it! You will fight it. No question. It’s instinct.
This is one of the best stage images I have seen in… I don’t know how long, and it makes me forget the slightly tedious prelude and the man I was staring at. Here I am not being presented with some genius’ brilliant point about fascists and the state of the world, but through this talented collective’s dramatic effort I am wholly transported into a situation in which I discover my own truth.
This is what theatre should do.
And I am not afraid of the bull.
Leaving, I feel caught out by my own initial cynicism. This was a play that took itself very seriously and some things are very serious. Like how this world turns into a bull-fighting arena and we are being pitted against our very human neighbours. Maybe if, sometimes, we put our sordid, cliché-hating, edginess aside and treat things earnestly and without distance, things could change for the better.
I do not condone bull fighting in any way, I want to say. However, I do condone the fighting of fascists.
Recommended drink: A bowl of sangria in one of those multi-straw arrangements, shared with total strangers.
Catch Bull / Fight at Summerhall Former Women’s Locker Room from August 6-31 at 11:30 (50 mins). Tickets are available through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Issy Cory
Isobel Jacob
