This devised piece, created under the adventurous guidance of Cumbernauld Theatre artistic director Ed Robson, continues the myth-making via an impressionistic portrait of the artist as a young man that revels in its own avant-garde spirit.
Here we see Lorca as a sensitive and diminutive figure dwarfed by the flamboyant machismo of his peers Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel. No wonder he falls for the moustache-obsessed Dali, who enters dressed in white from a wardrobe while a black-clad Bunuel rises up from behind a piano.
With a woman playing Lorca in the shape of Imogen Toner, this is no ordinary biographical homage. Rather, Robson and co have created a complex and opaque collage set in a scarlet-draped limbo where Dali and Bunuel bully Lorca as they foresee their own immortality. The play may deal with the heat-fuelled passions of Spain’s finest minds as the trio race around a blood-red floor framed by a rose-strewn dirt track, but in style is more Polish in spirit, and more akin to something on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
For all Lorca’s earnestness, portrayed by Toner with puppy-like devotion to the others, Robson isn’t afraid to tap into surrealism’s sense of its own ridiculousness. Johnny Austin and James McAnernery play Dali and Bunuel with a heightened largesse that provokes belly laughs only undercut by Lorca’s death. Framed by dressing room lights and surrounded by photographs of Lorca, Toner looks part diva, part Valentino. It’s a fitting image for the ultimate poetic pin-up.
Star rating: ***
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