Monday night: the last night of the Edinburgh Fringe, when hundreds of hopefuls – and a handful of successes – pack up to go home, though perhaps not to Louisiana.
An appropriate moment for the premiere of Kally Lloyd Jones’s cleverly imagined staging of the Brecht/Weill ballet-opera, The Seven Deadly Sins, in a co-production by her own Company Chordelia and Scottish Opera. Anna I (soprano Nadine Livingston) and Anna II (dancer Kirsty Pollock) leave the family shack in Louisiana in the 1930s, promising to make it big and send home cash a-plenty to build a proper house. It’s the Depression, what’s an unskilled girl from a rural backwater to do to coin it in? The venue – a former picture palace – holds the answer: get into the movies.
From archive films showing as we take our seats, to the over-arching concept of a mannishly suited Anna I directing the biopic of her own rise to the top, Lloyd Jones, abetted by designer Janis Hart, doesn’t miss a trick. The clapperboard cues Lust, Envy, Pride: Pollock’s splendidly ingenue Anna II struggles to hold onto her principles and her clothes – the Martha Graham jersey tube for Pride is a delicious period joke – while Anna I railroads her into submission, and a host of consumer goodies reaches their idle, grasping kin through the emblematic portal of an empty cinema screen.
Visually full of flair and invention, but musically strong as well. Livingston is a thrillingly barnstorming Anna I, pungently counterpointed by the male quartet who portray Anna’s idle, grasping family while Jessica Cottis deftly conducts the Scottish Opera orchestra through the shifting moods of Weill’s satirical score.
At O2 ABC, Glasgow, tonight and tomorrow, Edinburgh’s HMV Picture House on Saturday.
HHHH
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