In A festival in which headlines have been generated by big-scale, visually spectacular Polish productions of Macbeth (TR Warszawa’s cinematic show for the International Festival and Teatr Biuro Podrózy’s outdoor Fringe presentation on stilts), it is an ostensibly more modest piece, inspired by King Lear, which is most memorable. Songs Of Lear by Teatr Piesn Kozła (Song Of The Goat Theatre) of Wrocław – which interweaves small fragments of Shakespeare’s text with polyphonic song, carefully choreographed movement and live music – is not only the most deeply affecting show I have seen in Edinburgh this summer, it is also one of the most profoundly moving theatre productions I have ever experienced.
The work is played by 10 performers (five women, five men) in simple, contemporary black costume, a musician (on bellows bagpipes) and a narrator/conductor (TPK’s artistic director Grzegorz Bral). Incorporating a squeezebox, a west African harp and, in a startling moment, an extremely simple and effective set of drums, the piece uses original songs, composed by Jean-Claude Acquaviva and Maciej Rychly, to reflect the contending human forces (stability and chaos, power and its loss, love and its negation) which energise the Bard’s great tragedy.
As Acquaviva’s songs (in the European choral tradition) collide with Rychly’s extraordinary, visceral pieces (written in the Coptic language of Egypt), the cumulative effect is so emotionally intense it is almost overwhelming. The palpable immersion of TPK’s performers in the work, and their exquisite facilities in song and movement, remind us that words are bottles into which we pour emotions, but which can never entirely contain them. In Songs Of Lear, human emotion overflows the capacities of language, creating a unique, tragic theatre of the most powerful kind.
There is also immense emotional power, and extraordinary political resonance, in Mies Julie, Yael Farber’s stunning adaptation of Strindberg’s late 19th-century Swedish tragedy. Set in a farmstead in modern-day South Africa, Farber’s drama draws brilliantly on Strindberg’s potent combination of painfully mangled class and gender relations, adding the agonised racial politics which, inevitably, still pertain in her country.
The contradictions of Strindberg’s Julie are magnified by her fear for the future of the Afrikaner land-owning class to which she belongs. For the subject of her desire, black farmhand John, the dangers are amplified by the still transgressive nature of sexual relations across the racial divide.
The brilliance and strength of Farber’s script and her directing is manifested in emotionally and physically unrestrained performances by Hilda Cronjé (who plays Julie with extraordinary desire and vicious bitterness) and Bongile Mantsai (whose John shudders with the fear, rage and pride of a great bull). They are supported wonderfully by Thokozile Ntshinga (as John’s mother), singer and musician Tandiwe Nofirst Lungisa, and composers and musicians Daniel and Matthew Pencer (all of whom contribute powerfully to the extraordinary, premonitory atmosphere of the production).
This is, quite simply, a tour de force. I have never seen Strindberg’s dance of death accomplished with such erotic force and brutal passion.