Festival Theatre MEMORY CELLS Exploring the machinations of power ●●●●●
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teenage boys (both of whom are haunted by their memories of an inexplicable childhood encounter), chronologically, initial scenes are a little heavy on exposition. Once the back story is dealt with, however, the punchy script delivers some very powerful scenes, as first asexual nerd Brian Lackey then child baseball star turned gay hustler Neil McCormick, struggle to come to terms with what happened to them when they were eight years old. Despite occasional tussles with Kansan accents the cast is generally strong, with the two leads coming into their own in the play’s bleakly poignant final scene. (Allan Radcliffe)
Telephone Booking Fringe 0131 226 0000 International Festival 0131 473 2000 Book Festival 0845 373 5888 Art Festival 07500 461 332 ■ Gilded Balloon Teviot, 622 6552, until 30 Aug, 1pm, £9–£10 (£8–£9).
Louise Welsh excels at excavating the dark and depraved aspects of the human psyche, eking out secret desires and fears. In this dialogue between a beautiful captive girl and her love-deluded jailer, not much else is given away by the brutal staging, chilling sound effects and lack of external references. The verbal (and physical) sparring between the characters (John Stahl terrifyingly unreadable in his intentions and Emily Taaffe instantly eliciting sympathy) drops constantly shifting clues to the couple’s relationship, amending and revising, messing with time until the predator/victim set-up is muddled. The characters are fleshed out – Cora has a name, a mother, a friend, she used to have gerbils – but the shifting bounds of the relationship and refusal of director Hannah Eidinow to give any solid interpretation imply that isolated in this room an archetypical struggle is being represented, and it’s all the more affecting for it. Instead of bringing to light one fully formed example of hidden humanity, this time Welsh bores straight into the heart of the matter, echoing the locked rooms in all our minds. (Suzanne Black) ■ Pleasance Dome, 556 6550, until 30 Aug (not 17, 24), 5.20pm, £10–£12 (£9–£10).
MYSTERIOUS SKIN Bleakly powerful adaptation of bestselling novel ●●●●●
This disarming exploration of sexuality, desire and childhood abuse is based on the acclaimed novel by Scott Heim, which became the equally well-received movie adaptation by maverick filmmaker Gregg Araki. But Prince Gomolvilas’ stage version wisely resists merely recreating the film onstage, instead boiling Heim’s novel to its dramatic essentials and moving the story along at pace.
As Gomolvilas opts not to tell the story of a pair of wildly different
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DEREVO: HARLEKIN Sinister, beautiful show from Fringe favourites ●●●●●
You never quite know where you are with Derevo. The 80 minutes of Harlekin somehow fly by, aided in part by the trio’s willingness to hop around theatrical styles from dance to commedia dell’arte, from mime to psychological terror. It’s apt that such genre-bending should occur, given the harlequin’s history of being an acrobat, an assassin and someone who gets food thrown in their face. At the curtain call, the official moment for which appears uncertain for both the audience and, seemingly, performers alike, leader Anton Adasinsky is the picture of calm, his fingers sliding across a lute before casually waving to his crowd.
Contrast this with the whirling dervish who has jerked, gyrated and flopped across and onto the stage over the past hour and 20, accompanied by the beguiling Elena Iarovaia – whose roles include an organ-grinder’s monkey and the woman who, quite literally, takes her lover’s heart – and Tanya Khabarova,
the stumbling host and puppeteer whose first act is to peek through the curtain at an imaginary audience on the other side of the stage and away from us. It’s a neat, discombobulating touch which is bolstered
by delightful details such as Adasinsky doubling for a shower, CD player and bath towel. But this being Derevo, there are moments which might revisit you in a tense nightmare, the sight of Adasinsky seemingly poisoned over and over again or attached to a wide bar/crucifix which swings over the front row’s heads. And you find you are keen to remove your eyes from the occasionally manic smile of the bald Iarovaia; in your darker thoughts, the pair might bring to mind Crispin Glover and Anne Heche during her alien abduction period.
The sinister and the beautiful have been Derevo’s trademarks ever since their Edinburgh debut in 1997 with Red Zone, and Harlekin provides another memorable chapter in their captivating story. (Brian Donaldson) ■ Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, until 30 Aug (not 16, 23), 1pm, £12–£14.