The final Monday of the Fringe has a strange feel. Is it still going or has “the circus” ended?
The majority of shows have finished their runs, but some linger on for one final performance. A walk through the city is a walk through a place winding down at a furious pace.
Posters and flyers are making their way to recycling bins and centres. Many of the outside venues were being taken down – the Book Festival tents were being packed up at breakneck speed. The city was still full of Fringe-goers but there was not that much left to see.
The hope is always to end the Fringe on a high. Hopefully with a performance that will keep the Fringe spirit alive in your soul through the dark winter months. Summerhall has, since it arrived on the scene in 2012, attempted to keep the Fringe spirit alive throughout the year.
Lessons on Revolution (Undone Theatre and Carmen Collective) was performed down deep in the basement of Summerhall, in the Former Women’s Locker Room. This rather dusty, enclosed venue help the performers create a communal atmosphere, trying to replicate the sense of togetherness felt by the student radicals at the centre of the story. Cut off from the busy spaces in the floors above, the room also added to the sense of being transported to another time and place – to the late 1960s.
This was the type of performance that maintains your faith in the cultural value of the Fringe. It also shows what can be done with archival material. Archives are often dismissed as dead repositories of the past. Most archives contain treasures waiting to be unearthed. They are pregnant with potential, including for creative use.
Lessons on Revolution’s intermingling of the personal and the historical gave the show an impressive depth.
The starting point and main focus of Samuel Rees and Gabriele Uboldi’s performance were the student protests at the London School of Economics in the late 1960s, and some of the key figures involved in them. These protests were part of a much wider wave of protests, including anti-Vietnam war protests in America and major protests in France. For many on the radical left, these protests were a harbinger of revolutionary social change. In 1968 Daniel Cohn-Bendit described ‘student revolt’ as a ‘spectre haunting Europe’. As Lessons on Revolution reflected, many of these hopes went unrealized. Though, it should be said that many on the conservative right have subsequently argue that the ‘revolting students’, including those at the LSE, did in fact change western society; in their view, for the worse.
The performers made excellent use of materials they had discovered in the LSE archives. They didn’t always find what they wanted in the archives, not everything helped them tell the story they wanted. This frankness added nuance to their tale. Though political themes (such as colonialism) were central to the narrative, this was not some one-sided polemic. Many lessons could be drawn from the episode, but the audience was left to draw their own.
Members of the audience were asked if they would volunteer to read out some of the lines. Those that did so did a good job and again added to the communal, collective feel. It also made the audience really focus on the character of the language used by the main players in the events on 1968.
Though we were in a slightly claustrophobic room, we were going through the experience together. The performers were just a few inches from the audience which again increase the sense of connection and immediacy. There were some nice period touches, including the use of an overhead projector – as lecturers would have used in that time. Sound and lighting were effectively used throughout, especially during the blackout moments. During these, the inherent drama of the events were made manifest.
What gave the performance real force was the way that the performers connected the historical themes with their own life experiences. This added to the sense of history not as something in the past and finished but with ongoing relevance.
As the temperature in the venue rose, so did the intensity of the performance, with Rees and Uboldi opening up to the audience revealing personal challenges they had faced while working on the project and in their personal lives. The climax arose with a nightmare vision of uncontrolled fire engulfing their cramped flat and destroying the materials they had assembled.
The audience was left with clear example of the value of re-examining the past but also that the past gives no simple, clear answers.
