Edinburgh Festivals 2015: theatre reviews

This review is from London, October 2024. Arcade will play at thet 2025 Edinburgh Fringe, along with Darkfield’s Eulogy and Darkfield Radio. Blackout theatre specialists Darkfield – aka Glen Neath and David Rosenberg – have spent years crafting meticulously disorientating immersive worlds that audience members experience via sophisticated headphones-based binaural sound design, performed in entirely lightless shipping containers. On the whole, they feel like surreal, sinister dreams: evocative but you’re effectively a passenger – just along for the ride, with no real agency of your own, and as the (very short) shows wear on and you get acclimatised to the darkness I’ve generally found the whole thing starts to feel a bit sillier. Arcade is a clever and unsettling leap forwards, giving you a degree of agency as you’re stood at an old school arcade machine with a big button on it that you press to indicate ‘yes’ in the choose-your-own-adventure style story. You do not in fact play an arcade game, but the general understanding in the interactive story relayed through your headphones is that you’re an avatar named Milk in a game that you could either interpret as intended to be imagined as sophisticated VR or taken literally as a headphones game from Darkfield. Whatever the case, you’re thrust into a violent, absurdist dystopia and while one button might not sound like a lot of agency, when I got shot point blank in the head within about 30 seconds of starting after making an...

This review is from the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe. Darkfield’s hallucinatory audio dramas are practically their own genre and I don’t think it’s totally unreasonable to say that if you’ve seen one before, you basically know what you’re getting yourself into with a newie. ‘Seen’, of course, is not the operative word: like predecessors ‘Seance' and ‘Flight’, ‘Eulogy’ takes place in total blackout conditions, inside a sealed shipping container, with the show prerecorded and relayed via headphones - a trippy audio drama relayed in disorientating binaural sound. There’s a twist with this one, which is that our headsets have microphones in them, and throughout the show we’re asked a series of yes/no questions about ourselves - it’s mostly at the beginning and I started to wonder if there had been any point to it, but it actually builds up to an extremely amusing twist at the end – it’s a throwaway gag, but it’s a good throwaway gag. Otherwise, it’s a traditional Darkfield adventure: that is to say, a batshit crazy story that involves us being entered into some sort of bizarre contest at a strange hotel, where we’re put under the charge of a ‘helper’ who seems to be tasked with taking us through a ritualistic series of actions that must be followed to the letter if we’re to succeed in the contest. We do not follow them to the letter… and things get very dark. The plots in Darkfield shows always seem to follow the vertiginously swirling logic of dreams, with abrupt changes in location...

This review is from the Royal Court Theatre in London in December 2024. As Sutara Gayle’s intensely autobiographical show starts, the theatre sits in darkness, while a soulful, passionate, overture begins. Already, it feels like we’re bearing witness to something spiritual. And then we see her; Gayle, otherwise known as Lorna Gee stands angelic and sturdy, ready to tell her life story.  And what a remarkable story it is. The Legends of Them takes us back to reggae pioneer Gayle’s childhood in Brixton, through her sexual awakening, early music career and on a transformative trip to India. We see her moving from one school to the next, into the care system and finding her soul through singing. Is all of it coherent? Absolutely not. Gayle flits from the body of one person in her life to the next, sometimes without any change in her physicality at all. In just a few seconds, she is her mother, a child psychiatrist, and her sister. There is no sense of a linear structure, with the narrative jumping around haphazardly.  You’re sure to leave the theatre slightly bewildered. But, once you accept it is a bit of a minefield, Gayle’s otherworldly presence is hard to look away from. Blending music with history, video with raw emotion onstage, she is a force to be reckoned with. In scraps she reveals herself through her memories; scenes from her past flash into reality and then disappear once more. Gayle has had a life so rich that even one of her recollections could form a full play...