Edinburgh International Festival Theatre
Muster Station: Leith
Leith Academy
Neil Cooper
Four stars
If it feels like we’re living in a real life disaster movie right now, Edinburgh’s site-specific auteurs Grid Iron are here to take the temperature of the times in epic fashion.
As the culmination of Edinburgh International Festival’s four-year residency at Leith Academy, director and co-writer Ben Harrison working alongside playwrights Nicola McCartney, Uma Nada-Rajah and Tawona Sithole have contemplated a worst-case scenario for the end of the world as we know it and brought it to life.
Utilising the full expanse of the school, Muster Station: Leith reimagines the venue as part sanctuary, part concentration camp for those on the run from an environmental catastrophe close to home.
It begins with a queue, as the audience are ‘processed’, as they might be in a post Brexit airport, detention centre or Covid vaccination centre. From here we’re promenaded from swimming pool to gym to library, where a cast of eight play out a series of snapshot scenarios in which the asylum seekers are those on our doorstep.
If this Ballardian landscape resembles the strain of apocalyptic drama that subverted 1970s British children’s TV, put in the context of now, it doesn’t seem that far-fetched. Nada-Rajah’s rebellion scene, with Shyvonne Ahmmad and Paul McCole a pair of sparring insurgents, flits between rabble rousing and slapstick.
Sithole’s meeting between cultures is a more intimate exchange between Pauline Goldsmith and Joseph Ogeleka’s detainees. And Olivia Sikora brings to life McCartney’s Finnish official putting the audience through a citizenship test reveals much more than our international ignorance.
Running at two and a half hours without an interval, it’s a lot to navigate. If some of the quieter moments are lost to school gym hall acoustics, the international language of pop music punctuates things alongside David Paul Jones’ brooding score.
Karen Tennent’s design reinvents each room from their original function to something even more expansive in the final scene, in which some kind of collective action seems possible. Of course, it could never happen here.
Until August 26 – https://www.eif.co.uk/events/muster-station-leith
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