We all wonder if we had taken a different path where we might have ended up. And in Rhum and Clay’s latest piece, inspired by Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game, chess – a game in which every move has a consequence – becomes the metaphor for the life of a man who has lost his memory as a result of trauma. The letter B is sewn on to his shirt so that is what he calls himself, but his identity is so fractured that in this staging he is played by four people: three actors and a musician. Fred McLaren’s smoky jazzy score is as much an aspect of B and his story as the words spoken, and the physical movement of Charlotte Dubery, Julian Spooner and Matthew Wells.
Zweig was himself an unhappy exile from Nazi Austria and we first meet B on an ocean liner in 1939 as it leaves Europe heading for New York, and B is set to play a game of chess against the Russian world champion. But where does his prowess at chess come from, and even if he can beat the Russian, can he outwit fate itself? In a series of flashbacks and replays, we see how different moves and moments in B’s life – including his hand brushing against a new secretary’s hand in an office in Berlin in 1937 – have led to this endgame.
Rhum and Clay have come of age as a theatre company. This beautifully put-together, intelligent and moodily atmospheric look at free will and the way individuals are tossed hither and thither by the jackboot of history.
They have always been a company who use visuals and the physical in a compelling way, but here they get the storytelling right too, in a show that rather ironically highlights the slipperiness of narrative and the unreliability of the stories we construct around our own lives.
At Underbelly, Edinburgh, until August 30. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
