Time travel on festival stage
18 August 2002

Music halls were dealt a blow
by cinema and ticket licensing laws

Alongside love, death and loss, the past is a constant among favourite themes for modern playwrights.

At this year's Edinburgh International Festival, audiences can experience productions of two new plays that explore the subject of memory in very different ways.

Variety, a play by Scottish playwright Douglas Maxwell, is about the dying days of music hall in Scotland.

It tells the story of a group of performers getting ready to go on stage for the last time before the theatre is turned into a cinema.

Meanwhile, The Girl on the Sofa, by Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, is the story of a disenchanted painter.

She sees a teenage girl in the street who reminds her of her younger self. Moved to paint a picture of the girl, she thinks about her childhood as the ghosts of the past continue to haunt her.

Despite their different plots, the theme of the past is embedded in the fabric of both plays.

Retrospect

In The Girl on the Sofa, which was commissioned by the Edinburgh International Festival and translated into English by David Harrower, the past and present literally intermingle on stage.

As the woman sits painting a picture of a girl on a sofa, contemplating the past, her younger self sits on a sofa, variously getting bored and wondering what to do next.

"Perhaps I'll paint a picture," she says. "Maybe I'll go into town."

Echoing plays like Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Paula Vogel's How I Learned To Drive, the past in The Girl on the Sofa, is a place to which the central character travels in order to return with a greater understanding of her present situation.

Fog

She is at a dark moment in her life. Her mother is dying, her father is dead, she does not see eye to eye with her sister. She has recently separated from her lover and has lost all confidence in her ability to paint.

In Thomas Ostermeier's production, younger and older versions of the woman's sister, mother and father meander in and out of stage designer Rufus Didwiszus' cage-like set, sometimes retreating into the shadows and other times stepping into centre stage.

Strong lighting choices by Urs Schonebaum help differentiate between the constantly shifting time-scales. And a proscenium-sized scrim gives the stage a muffled, out-of-focus quality at the start of the play, a visual representation of the fogginess of memory.

Eerie

Memories manifest themselves in very different ways In Grid Iron Theatre Company's production of Variety.

Here, the past does not dominate the plot, it dominates audience members' minds as they watch the show.

It is largely an external force, one to be ruminated over by the audience rather than the characters.

Director Ben Harrison makes the most of sound effects, using eerie laughter and applause in the rafters evokes a sense of loss.

Meanwhile, the use of crackly old cinema film interspersed with constantly moving painted theatrical backdrops gives a sense of time marching on.

In fact, as they scuttle about their daily lives, getting ready for the next show, the characters in Variety are more obsessed with the future than the past.

Although they do not find out for certain they are going to be jobless until the end of the play, the characters are painfully aware that times are changing throughout.

Illusion

Shifts in music hall licensing laws and the popularity of the movies are just two of the threats that drive some of the characters to grab ruthlessly at the most promising-looking meal ticket.

Meanwhile, others just stare at the ground and ask: "What happens next?"

Yet, history has left its scars on almost everyone. As the performers wonder what lies ahead, painful relationships, dead children and the standing ovations of times gone by continue to haunt them.

In his programme note for Variety, Maxwell tackles the question that every playwright dreads: "What's the play about?"

His answer to this self-posed question seems, in some ways, to describe not only the central theme of his play, but that of The Girl on the Sofa too.

"It's about the idea that everything we regard as permanent in our life is actually an impermanent game we've invented," he writes. "Which can disappear at any moment, swept away by time, and leaving us with nothing."

Variety and Girl on the Sofa are showing as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, which runs until 31 August.

Copyright British Broadcasting Corporation