All theatre contains an element of voyeurism. It’s an idea that animates Interiors, the first of two shows by the Scottish company Vanishing Point that kick off this year’s Edinburgh international festival theatre programme. Conceived and directed by Matthew Lenton, it owes a good deal to Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Interieur, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and it is utterly riveting.
As spectators, we become Peeping Toms. We look through the spacious window of Kai Fischer’s design at a brightly lit domestic interior. It transpires that we are in northernmost Norway on the longest night of the year and that a dinner party is in full swing. The fur-clad guests arrive clutching guns, to ward off polar bears, but gradually start to unwind. They eat, drink, dance, flirt and, in one case, disastrously reveal a long-standing romantic passion. There is one catch: we cannot hear a word they say, but must learn the facts about their lives from a ghostly visitant who stands outside the window gazing in.
The play provides a potent dramatic metaphor for myriad reasons. It reminds us that, on social occasions, we are all, in a sense, giving a performance, and often lapse into bibulous overacting. The appearance of the spectral outsider also suggests we invent all kinds of rituals to distract us from the inevitability of death. Above all, the lighted room becomes a symbol of our urge to create a cosy retreat from the threatening outside world.
But the ideas rise naturally from the action, which is often mordantly funny – at one point, the guests scrabble around to find a lost contact lens belonging to the host’s granddaughter, only to insert it in the wrong eye – and the actors capture the whimsical oddity of our party manners. Peter Kelly as the nervous host and Barnaby Power and Aurora Peres as a couple whose loving relationship is doomed not to last the night are especially good. Lenton’s production, first seen at the Traverse in 2009 and since then around the world, will appeal to anyone who has peered nosily into a lighted window in a city street or country lane.
Voyeurism also lies at the heart of Vanishing Point’s more recent but less successful show, The Destroyed Room. The starting point was a Jeff Wall photograph of a ransacked room, but the debate is whether we take the tragedies of the modern world and neutralise them by treating them as a form of entertainment. By watching an Islamic State video of a beheading, do we become complicit in the event? Does gazing at victims of the Japanese tsunami sharpen our compassion, or turn us into sensation-seeking ghouls? These are valid questions, but the form chosen by Lenton does little to enlighten us. Three actors – Elicia Daly, Pauline Goldsmith and Barnaby Power – take part in a seemingly improvised conversation under the watchful gaze of TV cameras.
But I felt the actors were being pushed into articulating ideas they didn’t necessarily espouse, and that their random chat was less compelling than the soundless speech of the vivacious diners in the superior Interiors.
• Interiors and The Destroyed Room are at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 8 August. Box office: 0131-473 2000.
