ARTICLES: GRID IRON

13/11/05

© MARK FISHER published in Scotland on Sunday

GRID IRON IN BEIRUT

LAST TIME Judith Doherty flew back from Beirut she travelled straight on to her native Belfast. A fellow passenger asked her about the dangers of the Lebanese capital. But, as news came through of an outbreak of Protestant violence in Belfast, Doherty was in little doubt about which place seemed the safest. For all its troubled history, Beirut is relatively peaceful today.

Likewise, when Doherty compares the ease of working in Beirut with the hassles of New York, she knows which she'd prefer. As producer of Edinburgh's Grid Iron theatre company, she is exporting her work in all directions. She's taking the company's 2003 Fringe hit, Those Eyes, That Mouth, to Lebanon at the same time as trying to give an extra lease of life to this year's multi-award winning Fringe hit, The Devil's Larder, in the Big Apple.

Finding the Beirut equivalent of the deserted New Town flat where Those Eyes, That Mouth was performed has proved a lot less fraught than discovering a match in New York for an after-hours Debenhams.

All the same, working in Beirut is an experience like no other. Doherty and the company flew there this week at the invitation of the British Council not only to perform Those Eyes, That Mouth - an atmospheric piece of music-theatre starring actor Cait Davis and singer-composer David Paul Jones - but also to introduce 20 young actors from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Tunisia to the idea of site-specific theatre.

As well as performing at night, they're running daily workshops which, after two weeks, will culminate in a week of performances of an Arabic work-in-progress devised with the local actors. Director Ben Harrison will be explaining the methods he has developed since 1997 when he staged a startling adaptation of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber in Edinburgh's supposedly haunted Mary King's Close.

For an actor to perform with the audience on all sides and at close quarters requires particular presence of mind. So does creating theatre in response to the architecture and atmosphere of an unusual space. These are skills that Grid Iron has perfected in shows such as Gargantua, Decky Does a Bronco and Fermentation.

Performed in playgrounds and derelict buildings, they gained a special energy and atmosphere. The same will be true of the company's next show, Roam, which will be staged at Edinburgh International Airport in April under the auspices of the National Theatre of Scotland.

Such technically demanding settings are unknown to the Lebanese crew who have valuable lessons to learn about how to provide sound and lighting in places that might not even have an electricity supply. "We're leaving real experience, not just telling them what to do and saying goodbye," says Doherty.

It's not only the Lebanese who'll be learning. "The international aspect of our work is one way to keep it fresh," says Harrison, who staged the first ever site-specific show in Jordan last year at the King Hussein Cancer Hospital in Amman. "That really felt pioneering. It was the first time an audience had ever been asked to walk as they watched a show."

In Beirut, he's discovering a lot about the power of buildings to carry the weight of traumatic human experience. "In Edinburgh a ruined building is an aesthetic object," he says. "Whatever the history of the building, you can shine a light on a beautiful crumbling wall and it will have a resonance. Whereas every building in Beirut carries this military and political history."

This was brought home to him most powerfully last year in Beirut while doing a workshop with student actors. "We did an exercise in which the actors had to stand in the most powerful spot in the room and then in the spot where they felt weakest," he says. "The strongest spot was banal and every-day, but in the weakest spot we sensed a whole history of a nation. All these actors had spent their entire childhood and most of their adolescence camping out in spaces like the one we were in. In the weakest spot they would be crouching in the corners of the room - and these people knew how to crouch in a room."

The knock-on effect is likely to be that Grid Iron's work in Scotland will take on a harder edge. Roam will be their most political work to date. "An airport is one of the most politicised - and certainly, legalised - spaces in the world," says Harrison, who'll be drawing on a variety of sources including interviews with refugees for this tenth anniversary production. "So we'll definitely have a political agenda. It'll talk about the divisions between rich and poor and, obviously, terrorism. It won't be a day in the life of Edinburgh Airport."

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