THE end of week one at Arches Live! and the theme is loss and bereavement. Jenna Watt's new solo piece, Little Vikings Are Never Lost, is a touching 50-minute journey through the landscape of loss, inspired by a visit to Norway. On stage, there's a s
tylised hint of mountains, fjords, forests, picnic stuff; and in the heart of the childlike speaker, a game of hide-and-seek which turns out to be a quest for the memory of an adored, dead father. Watt is a charming and hugely inventive performer, both verbally and physically; and this is a beautifully-shaped story of the acceptance of loss, even if it could use some tougher content, and a style less self-consciously sweet.
Sacha Kyle's Lost Property tackles the same theme through a more deliberately fragmented format, involving a combination of installation and performance that begins with comedy, as a scatty administrator takes us down into a shambolic basement Lost Property Office, and then ranges on through an increasingly powerful alternation of melancholy and absurdity, as a team of performers lead us through all the physical and cultural debris of the lost 20th century, strewn through a dazzling array of hidden Arches spaces.
And Gareth Nicholls's Violent Night is a brave, circus-like dystopian vision of a 21st-century culture hooked on pornographic and abusive sexual imagery, and on a self-destructive relationship with nature. Sadly, though, many of the late-night crowd seemed to see the horrific bullying of a superb Siobhan Reilly as a source not of sadness but of raucous comedy; and there's something amiss with satire which only serves, for some, to reinforce the drastic loss of moral direction it's trying to expose.
The full article contains 308 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
