When better than this pre-Brexit year for Edinburgh to lean towards France? It’s a stimulating notion for the festival to have as a resident company the Bouffes du Nord, and to spirit across the Channel one of the stage’s most influential expatriates: Peter Brook left England for Paris more than 40 years ago, setting up his anti-West End stall (“middle-class theatre is deadly,” he reiterated recently) in an alluringly battered old music hall, from which he has tipped the wink to swaths of modern theatre.
This summer the company has given the festival The Beggar’s Opera, directed by Robert Carsen, and Marguerite Duras’s La Maladie de la mort, directed by Katie Mitchell. Now Brook and his long-term collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, direct a rapt parable, The Prisoner. It is beautiful but inert. A play in which, as you itemise the virtues, the dynamic slips away.
All moments are drenched in Brook’s theatrical gifts: complete concentration, intense visualisation, meditative seriousness. David Violi’s design (irritatingly labelled as “set elements” ) of rocks and jutting Godot-like branches glows under Philippe Vialatte’s lighting as if embedded with candles. In a precisely calibrated sequence the passing of days is marked silently by the slow dipping and rise of light. A vivid nature soundscape ticks and whirs and whistles.
It’s easy to make Brook’s dislike of decoration itself sound merely decorative, as if he were setting himself up as a theatrical Marie Kondo. His scenic decluttering is part of his argumentative meditations. Discussion of punishment and forgiveness is posed not in the urgent (or indeed recognisable) everyday, but in fairytale talk of a faraway land in which a guilty man is required to sit outside the walls of a prison until he feels he has redeemed himself by creating his own internal prison.
There is another discussion, to do with ownership. Why do people think they can claim another person – and why does anyone think they own a land? Brook’s casting embodies this last question in casting that spills over frontiers, with actors from Sri Lanka, Rwanda and Northamptonshire. Hiran Abeysekera is wonderfully physically fluent as the unimprisoned prisoner, at one point seeming to magick a rat on to the stage, and enacting a small cycle of human behaviour as he first makes a chum of the creature, then fights and eats it.
Still the main action is gridlocked – in part by its virtues. Every second is cherished and hallowed: no moment pulses into the next. The conscious internationalism begins to make things look approximate. Vital questions about the purpose and effect of imprisonment are not so much pressed home as wafted.
Very different from the smaller, utterly-of-its-time The End of Eddy. This 2014 autobiographical novel by the French writer Édouard Louis has a shaking immediacy that seems to have eroded even the traditional British resistance to works in translation.
Louis’s account, begun when he was in his teens, is of a boy growing up in desolate, post-industrial northern France. He is jeered at for his “girly” ways, and bashed up by bullies – and by himself, as he has a go at dating girls and despairs of “being a man”. It would be worth hearing simply as a gruelling record of homophobia, but it goes deeper and wider. It is a vital description of how extreme poverty moulds a mental landscape – and of how education can change lives. Louis was released from misery not by vocational training but by liberal studies – theatre, actually. That might be worth attending to in anti-arts England, where education policy flies by the idea that only those with money should be allowed to (are somehow innately equipped to) study Latin or classical music.
It was, says the narrator of The End of Eddy, not what I did that made them attack me. It was who I was, and what I looked like: a distinction made for the stage. Stewart Laing’s direction of Pamela Carter’s adaptation ingeniously dramatises the violence and isolation at the centre of Louis’s book. An entire family is conjured up – in the flesh and in pre-recorded videos – by two strong young actors. Identically dressed in tracksuit bottoms, bright T-shirts and trainers, Kwaku Mills, who graduated from Rada this year, and Alex Austin divide the main part between them: the temptation would be to angst it all up, but both are contained and patient, until release finally lets them dance.
This splitting of the part has a further dimension – Mills is black, Austin is white: racism is one of the many hatreds buzzing around Eddy’s home, where his father is constantly warning him about “towel heads”. As does the use of video: in Louis’s home every room has a telly – rescued from dumps and renovated by his father. They are never turned off: watching is “as natural as breathing”. Austin and Mills appear on the monitors as a surly smoking mother, and an elder brother with frightening fixed eyes (the screen slides up its pole to show how tall he is). When a child disappears, one screen goes blank. When bullies smash Eddy to the ground, a screen slides to the floor and his face swivels to the horizontal.
This is a show more visually than verbally adroit. It too much wants to explain, is too anxious about its audience – it’s a co-production with the young person’s theatre Unicorn, in London, where it can be seen in September. Yet the central story is magnetic: this is far from the end of Eddy.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Prisoner ★★
The End of Eddy ★★★
• The Prisoner is at the Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 26 August. At the National Theatre, London, from 12 September to 4 October
• The End of Eddy is at the Studio, Edinburgh, until 26 August. At the Unicorn, London, from 13 September to 6 October
