Theatre
Pyrenees
Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Neil Cooper
Four stars
"If you don't want to see a man fall," the Proprietor of the out of season Alpine hotel says at one point in David Greig's stately meditation on identity, "look away."
Like the play it belongs to, it's a line that works on many levels. The fall the Proprietor refers to stems from the army of intrepid would-be explorers braving the rocks, but it also refers to the plight of the unnamed middle-aged Man found unconscious in the snow but unable to remember anything of himself or how he got there. A young woman, Anna, is dispatched from the British Consulate to find out who the man is, only to fall for his world-weary charm. When another woman, Vivienne, arrives at the hotel, a whole new world opens up about who exactly the Man might be.
There is laughter and forgetting aplenty in John Durnin's urbane revival of Greig's 2005 play, which, in the courtyard of Frances Collier's design, is rendered as a piece of broodingly ice-cool European art-house that delves deep into the psycho-sexual drives of a suburban mid-life crisis.
In this respect, Dougal Lee's Man resembles a more debonaire Reginald Perrin, desperate for excitement and adventure beyond his humdrum world, but unable to cut the ties that bind once he realises they're still in place. Isla Carter's forever in motion Anna similarly seems none too sure about her own self-image. With only Basienka Blake's Vivienne in any way sure of herself as the accent of Mark Elstob's Proprietor flits between nations, reinvention without borders is clearly left wanting in a forensically intelligent dissection of the mountains we have to climb before finding ourselves anew.
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