In 2006 the Edinburgh International Festival hosted Long Life, a theatre work by acclaimed Latvian director Alvis Hermanis.
A deeply thoughtful and very humorous contemplation on the marginalisation of the elderly in an increasingly capitalist, youth-fixated Latvia, the piece proved that theatre could address matters of ageing, the end of life and care of the elderly with great creativity and imagination.
Tomorrow, the latest work by Glasgow-based theatre company Vanishing Point, promises to approach similar subjects with equally serious artistic intent. Following its world premiere at the Brighton Festival in May and dates in Brazil last month, the show - which centres on a young man who suddenly finds himself relocated, frighteningly, to another place from which he cannot leave - has its Scottish premiere at Glasgow's Tramway early next month.
Vanishing Point's artistic director Matt Lenton says that his "personal starting point" for the production was "notions of care". He is interested in the human dynamics of care, both between people and within individual human beings.
"When you need care, you have no choice," he observes. "But to provide care, you make a choice. Implicit in that choice are questions of where your responsibility ends and how far you're prepared to push yourself in caring for somebody else. What happens when you get pushed beyond your breaking point in caring for somebody else?"
In addressing these issues, Lenton chose, as so often in Vanishing Point's work, to eschew social realism and political commentary. The intention of Tomorrow, he explains, is to evoke emotional, psychological, even spiritual responses in the audience, rather than to deliver straightforward information or political messages.
"It's important to me that the work has an abstraction, that it's metaphorical," the director insists. "Our work is drawn from our world and our life, but it exists in a layer above or beneath it."
This search for metaphor and theatrical poetry brought Lenton to the concept of the psychopomp, the benign, mythical spirit guide who takes human souls on their journey from one life to another. Although he has no religious belief in such figures, Lenton found the idea of such a being, and the imagery it suggested, very relevant to the show; so much so, in fact, that the original working title for the piece was Psychopomp.
Tomorrow promises to be a poetic and elegiac piece of theatre. For those who have followed Vanishing Point's work, which includes such acclaimed works as Lost Ones (2004) and The Beautiful Cosmos Of Ivor Cutler (2014), this will come as no surprise.
The company has always been rooted in a form of European modernist theatre which wanted to make its audience feel more than it understood. "We were always influenced by European theatre, never by British theatre," says Lenton. "We were influenced by writers like Eugène Ionesco and practitioners like Tadeusz Kantor who, in my opinion, made a more visceral kind of theatre. It wasn't intellectual; or, at least, at point of delivery it didn't seem intellectual."
Lenton's hope is that Glasgow audiences will approach Tomorrow as they would the work of the great Romanian and Polish theatre makers who inspired him. In other words, not so much with an open mind, as with an open soul.
Tomorrow plays Tramway, Glasgow, October 4-11; for further details, visit www.vanishing-point.org. For more on the Luminate festival, visit www.luminatescotland.org
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