Institute
Institute
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Mary Brennan
It's what we all dread: at a moment of crisis, when we need someone to care - nobody does. Institute brings that dread centre-stage and then pokes at it, kicks it, laughs at it and even ignores it when it flinches or cries out. It's discomfitting, disjointed, brutal.
At times you want to look away, hope that the manic-panic disintegration that creator/director Amit Lahav evokes in this Gecko production will pass on its way, that the gorgeous, wispy-lyrical music will play again, and that the four male performers will join hands and dance as if carefree and mutually supportive.
But these reveries are brief, giving way to episodes where work-place stress or personal problems connive at needy situations where the "system" takes the place of caring - the set of towering filing cabinets (designed by Rhys Jarman and Lahav himself) suggests various images of control and containment, from the drudgery of office routine to the organising of needy "clients" into faceless case histories.
When drawers spring open, it's to unleash memories or make a visible reality of yearning fantasies in which the dancers shape-shift their roles as logic goes into freefall.
Are they carers or the institutionalised? Is the linguistic babel - French, German and English are among the tongues spoken - emblematic of misunderstanding and non-communication in the modern world? And who is really in charge of silencing protests with medication?
Chris Evans, Ryen Perkins-Gangnes and François Testory join Lahav in his dances of bitter farce and harrowing despair, never more unnerving than when, in the shadows up-stage, a lone man repeatedly falls into unseen oblivion. We never discover if anyone's there to catch him.
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