overwrought

As we'd bought our tickets for the Romanian adaptation of the Goethe-bias Faust back in May the reviews popping up over the previous few days weren't massively useful, though it was handy to know that we'd have to leave our seats and move to the other half of the venue for a bit. Slightly handier would have been a Google Maps reference showing the precise location of the Lowland Hall in which the performance was being performed, or perhaps a "WARNING: atypical Festival venue location" note in the programme or the ticket. Although LRT are not famed for their co-operative nature the EIF might have attempted something like including a free return journey to Ingliston from a starting point of the ticket-holder's choice in the price of the ticket. At least there was the option of the park-and-ride service at a frequency close to that of the airport shuttle but significantly cheaper, something the huge crowds flocking onto two handily-parked #100s parked at the first bus stop outside the venue on the way out ought to have borne in mind.

The first part of the set could probably have fitted inside the Festival theatre without too much bother where it could have been viewed by more than the 700 or so who were eventually crammed into the very flexibly-backed seats. The set was slightly more watchable than the performances, as performers appeared and disappeared and reappeared unexpectedly somewhere else. The two leads obviously had a fair bit of work to do but there was a lot of Acting taking place which made things a bit less engaging than they could have been. After a while various chunks of stage began to be rolled back and forth on runners to distances behind the set which might have been a bit too big for a standard theatre; after an hour the back of the main set was flapped open and a gap made through which people could wander to the other half of the hall for what appeared to have been deemed the Exciting Section containing most of the stuff shown in the clips available on the internet. There were a couple of raised terraces for people to stand on at either side but otherwise views of the strip of stage on which most of the pertinent performing was occurring were limited, even on tippy-toes. The gist was easily-grasped, though. Women cavorting with plastic models of pigs are fairly easy to identify even through a crowd. When sat on seats and looking at a stage the supertitles had been reasonably easy to see but (depending on where one stood in the other section) there was a fair bit of neck-movement required to flit between looking at the Acting and reading the dialogue.

Amongst the background-activity were a number of things which the slightly-distracted mind could easily interpret as mildly risky, perhaps even dangerous. An un-buttressed scaffold-tower on castors was being used at the start to support a fire-breather and his bottle of lamp-oil which he left in a little cradle when he disappeared. Still dripping oil, the bottle remained on the scaffold when it was whirled round and round a little later on with a few people clinging to it, pushed by people at the base. Shortly afterwards the strange shapes at the back resolved into fork-lift trucks, each dangling three people from its tines who were flinging rice over the audience who were only lightly ushered out of the way before the trucks passed (driven by people wearing (as were many of the performers) pig-head masks through which visibility was possibly a little bit limited). If you caught Fuerzabruta down at Ocean Terminal a couple of years ago when the impression given tonight was this this was trying to create a similar sort of physically-theatrical frenetic loud-dancey hectic feel, which it got a little bit towards but didn't do nearly as effectively or impressively.

When the pandemonium-section was over everyone had to shuffle back and find their seats, some obviously just going for any seat but a few attempting to insist on finding the exact chair they'd been in before despite it being unnecessary and far too time-consuming even if they'd made a note of their row number on the way in. I was mildly concerned that there might not be much else happening and that we'd be sat down just to be able to sit and clap but a little bit more occurred, unfortunately involving a bit more Acting and wailing but with a few good bits even if the set was no longer a surprise.

There were notices up around the entrance advising viewers that Romanian television would be filming the crowd and performance this evening and that if people wished to be interviewed they should give their consent when asked. We were almost out of the door when we passed the cameraman and a girl gesturing at me with a clip-on microphone but (notwithstanding a chance of fame on Romanian television) I felt that they might be better-off getting someone completely awestruck by the event to offer their opinion and that they'd probably feel they'd wasted their time getting mine. We'd also have been late for the bus we were just in time for and would have been waiting at a deserted park-and-ride depot for an extra half an hour, too. Father seemed keen to have praised the more salacious pig-related bits of the show (he had a line ready about pig/human relations being the norm where he lived in Lincolnshire, which they are though the most famous case involved a human male and porcine female rather than the human women and man-pigs on stage) but didn't choose to offer himself to the interviewer when I passed her by.