Star rating: ****
Fire and water are at the emotional and elemental heart of this all-too-rare appearance of a play by Edward Bond, a man often regarded as the grand-daddy of the so-called new brutalist school of playwriting, and is certainly a poet of great heart and soul. To see his turn-of-the-century affair concerning one young person's road to enlightenment via some future-eco disaster performed by some 30 members of Dundee Rep's Youth Theatre Company, as it is here in Sarah Brigham's production, makes for a compelling sense of event. Add the presence of Robert Paterson and Irene MacDougall, two of the most seasoned and most versatile veterans of the rep's professional ensemble company, and this three-night run proved essential theatre.
At first glance, the row of hoodied teens staring out at the audience like warriors are every parent's nightmare. Most fearsome is Jo, a young girl whose violent urges, which she lets loose on a rag-doll, provide release from a home life that encourages her to be even more destructive. Yet the gang she tries to lead to sanctuary in search of revenge, along with a grown-up casualty, somehow learn compassion beyond their own pain.
Brigham has made dark stuff indeed out of Bond's return to Eden on Leila Kalbassi's set of bombed-out railway tracks, across which Ivan Stott's soundtrack burbles forebodingly.
To see such a serious work produced on a scale so grand is to view a thrilling and disturbing panorama, especially when the youths circle the doll to rain bricks on it.
With Aislinn Mulholland making a strong and confident Jo, this is a bleakly mesmeric, ultimately life-affirming trip.
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