REVIEWS: NVA/NTS

9 September 2007

© MARK FISHER published in Scotland on Sunday

HALF LIFE

Kilmartin Glen, Mid Argyll, until 16 September 2007

***

IN HIS pacy debut novel, The Burning, Edinburgh writer Thomas Legendre focuses on the romantic life of a married couple through the lens of their obsessions. One a croupier, the other an economist, they understand their relationship in terms of high-rolling Las Vegas tables and the laws of supply and demand. Turning his hand to playwriting, Legendre attempts a similar trick in Half Life, performed outdoors on Forestry Commission land in Achnabreck, near Lochgilphead, as part of NVA's latest large-scale environmental art project.

This time, Legendre invents an archaeologist, Jacob Wheeler, whose obsession with the cup-and-ring marked stones of Mid Argyll has made him a stranger to his lawyer wife, Clare, and daughter, Tessa. Searching for clues from the Neolithic dead, desperate to find meaning in their ancient markings, Jacob becomes incapable of communicating with the living. When Tessa goes missing, feared dead, he looks for her with professional precision, working from the centre of the circle and spiralling out. He mourns her departure in the same way he chases the fleeting shadows of the ancient lives he tries to reconstruct. When the distraught Clare demands the return of her wedding ring, it is as if his greatest fear is the loss of a symbolic band of gold for future generations of archaeologists.

The performance, a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland, is an attempt to tie together themes that emerge from the audience's private daytime journeys around 16 sites in the Kilmartin area. These range from the hill-top fort of Dunadd, where once the kings of Dal Riata were crowned, to the deserted village of Arichonan, the sorry legacy of a greedy 19th century landlord. The connecting thread between the sites and the play is the sense of the lives lived in a place so bountiful in archaeological remains.

For the play, Simon Costin and James Johnson make the connection in their spectacular set of felled trees fanning out into a raised arc of wood which, with its low-level shadows, suggests the underworld of pagan belief. Undefined figures emerge from the forest to mirror the world of the living or abseil down like falling angels from some heavenly place. The production, jointly directed by Angus Farquhar and Mark Murphy, looks and sounds stunning thanks to high-contrast lighting by Phil Supple and the live score of unearthly strings by Rhodri and Angharad Davies, reminiscent of the abstract sound art at many of the sites.

But like the project as a whole, the play is a promising idea not entirely fulfilled. Backing off from confrontation, Legendre takes a reflective approach which, however lyrical and philosophically interesting, deprives the script of momentum. The play's journey is colourful but the conclusion uncertain because we're never sure what is at stake. A similar ambivalence affects the daytime tour round the sites: like a treasure hunt, it is great fun to do, but as a piece of art, it is too vaguely defined to add up to anything concrete. If this is a "dialogue with the dead", what is the character and content of the conversation? For such a public artwork, Half Life is surprisingly hermetic, even though it's an experience you wouldn't want to miss.

See other examples of my writing here:

arts politics • celebrity profiles • food • health • literature • music • non-celebrity profiles • opinion pieces • theatre reviews • travel • visual art

Academic • Actors • Agents • Articles • Companies • Festivals • Groups • Industry • Mailing List • Mark Fisher • Others • Reviews • What's On • Writers • Site Map