Theatre
Think Tank,
Out Of The Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
***

Big Brother might have kicked off the weekend's TV schedules with its line-up of attention-seeking wannabes, but over at the Leith Festival you could see something very similar in the flesh.

This piece by the Glasgow-based Ankur Productions invites the audience into an art opening in an increasingly claustrophobic room occupied by the Beuysian detritus of apparent enfant terrible Tunde Aragundade. As a conceptualist provocateur, this arch-manipulator falls somewhere between Yoko Ono and Tracey Emin, and a disparate bunch of guests turn up to ogle her wares. Except, as the art critic, the pregnant woman, the frustrated beautician, the pretty-as-a-picture coquette, the sci-fi geek and the solitary man slowly realise, it's they who are the main event.

So far, then, so Twilight Zone, as the human zoo parade their hang-ups via a mix of bonding-exercise exposition and melodramatic flashbacks. But this neat if old-fashioned idea can't decide if it's taking pot-shots at conceptualism and reality TV, or if it's creating a psychological soap opera based on the pain of confinement.

It was created out of weekly workshop sessions as part of Ankur's community programme, and seeing a company rooted in cultural diversity tackling such material is peculiar enough. But, while the ideas in Gavin Crichton's production may be half-formed, lack context and be in need of some serious dramaturgical input, its concerns with hyper-reality delve far deeper than the National Theatre of Scotland's recent look at Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. Like that production, Think Tank needs to take things far further. Only then might it become compulsive viewing.