Letters Home
Letters Home
Edinburgh International Book Festival
The intimate art of letter writing may have given way to the impersonal pings of social media over the last decade or so, but this quartet of short works presented by site-specific maestros Grid Iron in a unique collaboration with Edinburgh International Book Festival goes some way to claiming it back.
With the audience promenaded between a network of addresses in and around Charlotte Square, stories with themes of exile and the umbilical link with home are taken off the page and brought to life in this gentlest of fusions between forms.
In Details, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie charts a long-distance email love affair between a Nigerian woman and her American friend. Christos Tsiolkas's Eve and Cain brings the Bible's original dysfunctional family together in a mother-and-child reunion to end them all.
In the first, Joe Douglas directs Muna Otaru and Rhoda Ofori-Attah through the women's painful absence on a double bed on which they email each other. For the second, Ben Harrison has a fierce Charlene Boyd as Eve squaring up to Gavin Marshall's Cain on a sand-covered expanse in a piece that leans towards Greek tragedy in its classical formality.
Beyond theatre, film-maker Alice Nelson renders Kamila Shamsie's War Letters as an exquisite four-screen installation that moves between nations charting the Indian experience of the First World War. Michael John McCarthy has the audience buckle up for a flight from Jamaica for a sonic rendering of Kei Miller's England In A Pink Blouse. Here we see a young man's flight from home liberating him in a way that allows him to be exactly who is beyond his roots.
Accompanied by low-key scores by Philip Pinsky, and, in War Letters, Zoe Irvine, all four pieces are rendered exquisitely. It is Zinnie Harris's final postscript to the show, however, which moves the most, as the audience is allowed to eavesdrop in on the cast's post-show state of mind. There's something touching about seeing and hearing such personal bon mots spoken out loud in a show that shows off Grid Iron at their finest.
Runs to August 25
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article