Apparently it was Henry V who introduced the safe conduct document that eventually became the modern passport. Thaddeus Phillips’s intelligent, beautifully designed storytelling show muses on microchips and the philosophical meanings of safe conduct, in a piece based on his own travels around the globe. It’s like a stage version of Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent but with a smaller budget and better lighting. Phillips’s lighting rack does much more than simply shine a light, it becomes a prop and morphs into a plane travelling through the darkness or the glare of a bus’s headlights.
This is an elegant piece of storytelling spanning more than 20 years and many borders all over the world. Some of these borders have since disappeared. He tells a story about taking a ferry from Italy to the former Yugoslavia and finding himself stranded in a war zone; another about a train journey in which a mysterious man throws packages from the moving carriage into the apparent wilderness; and gives an explanation of how to order a takeaway in Gaza (apparently, it’s delivered by small boys running through tunnels to circumvent border controls). There are contrasts: passing through tight security to leave Israel, and walking almost unnoticed into Jordan.
The 75-minute show is intercut with the story of a young African stowaway whose high-flying dream of a new life in London crashed to the ground in a west London suburb. But the show was devised a few years ago, and the increasingly catastrophic global refugee crisis is under-explored. Its world’s eye view is very much that of a passport-carrying American with safe passage. It makes the show itself seem a little too safe, and Phillips like a raconteur rather than a man with something urgent to say.
- Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 30 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000
