Written by Emma Howlett
Review by Marina Funcasta
Summerhall – Anatomy Lecture Theatre
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Washed with urgency, bodies take up the tightly packed seats of Summerhall’s Anatomy Theatre; having just been made to stand for twenty minutes because of a blaring fire warning, the audience is restless. Confronted with white boards, it feels like we are being rushed into a classroom, made to sit through a lecture period six on a hot Friday afternoon. Fitting, I suppose. This was once all the space knew, it being a converted vet school.
How little those students knew about how many more bodies these walls would hold; how surprised they would be to find their rooms of intellectual rigour be repurposed as an underfunded arts space.
Caught up in the history of the room, the past already tugging the performance at its seams, the show began with what felt like a big bang. Faces, emerging from behind the blue velvet curtain, shock, entertain and disarm with intense theatricality. Is it a game show? Is it a historical skit? Is it a story about forgotten female scientists? Or about those who are still breaking the mould? Is it about physics? Or space? Or stars? Or magic? Or wonder?
It is a credit to writer and director Emma Howlett of TheatreGoose that Aether can be all of these things (and more) at once. That is, Howlett and of course the shapeshifters themselves, Sophie Kean, Abby McCann, Anna Marks Pryce and Gemma Barnett. Morphing from character to character, historical time period and performance style, each vignette come to life like flickers in the dark. Effervescent in their performances, Kean, McCann, Pryce and Barnett enter each exchange with explosive collisions yielding nothing but beautiful, if at times dense, results.
There is a lot to take-in with this production: like watching a chemical experiment for the first time, more of it obfuscates than enlightens. But the result is dazzling and left me wanting more. As Kean’s character, a PhD student at Cambridge, articulates towards the end of the play, to be always at the cusp of discovery is as life-sucking as life-affirming; but I can’t help but wonder if Howlett herself isn’t made from the same mold. Having conceived of three stellar Fringe shows, she is only on the cusp of a bright future. But to choose to celebrate this ambition is hard, for women, as Kean, and several other historical characters from the show seem to suggest: perhaps this is the fate of the female discoverer, vilified for her dedication to the craft. But if we can learn anything from TheatreGoose, is that collaboration and passion can work unimaginable wonders.
Unimaginable Wonders
Aether runs at Summerhall – Anatomy Lecture Theatre
Running time: Sixty minutes without interval
Review by Marina Funcasta (contact@corrblimey.uk)
Marina is halfway through an English literature degree at Edinburgh University, wherein she has been (considerably) involved in the drama scene: enjoying performing with their Shakespeare Company shows, but also modern takes on Arthur Miller. However, Marina’s interests are wide-ranging under the theatre genre – enjoying abstract, more contemporary takes on shows (with a keen interest in Summerhall)
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