If I should have a daughter, I don’t know that I’d want her meeting a man like this. CanadaHub’s Daughter dances on the line between pleasure and pain: the audience are unsure whether to give an ovation or stage a walkout.
Adam Lazarus is The Father. He talks about his six-year-old daughter. He is light-headed with anguish at her birth, joyful at her silly dances, then fed up at her reluctance to obey. Confessing his toxic attitudes towards women and his struggles with parenthood, he knows how to coax out laughter and then slap the room with silence.
Revealing acts of worsening behaviour and violence, he tests us, asking how far we are comfortable with what he’s telling us, how much we’ll forgive, and at what point we’ll stop laughing. He doesn’t like the things he’s done, but you never know how you’ll act until you’re in the moment, do you? Lazarus’s performance is magnetic, all the more uncomfortable because we don’t know how far he’s acting, and how far this is a kind of therapy we’re funding.
Daughter asks how we can reconcile the worst parts of ourselves with the person we want to be. But really, it is directed towards men. All men. Daughter is about the predatory parts of male society that are hidden by a show of charm and humour. It’s about the acceptance that the man dancing in fairy wings and the man with the metal rod in his hand are the same person. With love and violence, it leaves the audience reeling long after the bruise has faded.
- At CanadaHub @ King’s Hall, Edinburgh, until 26 August.
- Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews
