Looking on the bright side as Voltaire goes pop

Edinburgh International Festival: �I have to admit I sort of assumed that there�s basically no argument that can�t be solved by a good beer and a bit of a chinwag.� That�s the reflection of Candide in a new Australian version of the Voltairean satire.

Senay Boztas

I have to admit I sort of assumed that there's basically no argument that can't be solved by a good beer and a bit of a chinwag." That's the reflection of Candide in a new Australian version of the Voltairean satire.

He could just as easily say "a good tune and a bit of a hip wag" because in this exuberant production of Optimism, the unremitting disaster of the plot is always tempered by irrepressible song and dance.

Voltaire was writing against a tide of Enlightenment optimism, which held that despite natural and man-made catastrophe this was "the best of all possible worlds".

His picaresque novel Candide throws the cheerily naive hero into ever more horrific situations and philosophical challenges until he achieves a faintly hopeful realism.

Tom Wright, author of the play named after Candide's subtitle, was brought up in an Australia with a similar kind of "lucky country" rhetoric - but which is now at the sharp end of climate change, in a global mood of financial gloom, and ready for a bit of Voltairean deflation.

The Melbourne Malthouse Theatre show, which comes to the Edinburgh International Festival from August 15 to 17, might be a bit of a shock: it translates Voltaire's dry, eloquent wit into a two-act play mixing the utterly surreal, the intensely boring, spots of lewd stand-up comedy and perversely uplifting pop song and dance.

Wright condenses Candide into 19 scenes, complete with plenty of original text: as Candide crosses the world in search of his childhood love, Cunegonde, characters are raped, murdered, disembowelled, robbed, tortured and mutilated.

It's a nice coincidence that Voltaire's fictional Westphalia sounds a bit like Australia, and the well-known stand-up comedian Frank Woodley makes a refreshingly physical Candide, leavening his lines with partly-improvised comedy in front of curtain.

Voltaire's Candide is pretty bleak and so is this production, especially in its first act - but director Michael Kantor rescues the horrible sequence of action via song, dance and spectacle. The actors are dressed as circus performers and even when their voices aren't so great at challenges such as yodelling, they get "a fair go", as the jolly Australian myth dictates.

Choreographer Luke George believes a source of genuine optimism in the play is its physicality, especially as these are not trained dancers but comic actors.

"In Western culture, particularly, if you are not a dancer it is a massive leap to be physical and express things through your body - it is an optimistic gesture," he says.

"The scenes that involve dance are excessively optimistic and it feels like dance is the tap of optimism. You have the samba in Buenos Aires, the Things Can Only Get Better dance, and a modern poppy Hampster Dance. They don't relate to each other but they are the peak of the play trying to cheer itself up."

While George came on board in final production, composer and performer Iain Grandage worked on the play from its early stages. He helped select and arrange various songs - from Altered Images' I Could Be Happy to the classical Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. His original score also features quotations from Voltaire's contemporaries Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-Philippe Rameau, as well as more modern French composers Gabriel Fauré and Olivier Messiaen.

There's an international selection of songs - although Grandage notes that D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better "specifically in the UK resonates for Blairite Labour" - and a preference for the ironic feel of the 1980s.

Some things, like Frank Ilfield's She Taught Me to Yodel, are chosen precisely for their cheery inanity.

"These moments of idiocy, the banality of the songs ... they are completely without meaning except as desperate attempts to cheer us up," Grandage says.

More than this, though, they can actually be quite beautiful. "There are undoubtedly moments of this," he says. "Different songs are serving different functions, some as a relief. Wonderful Life by Ace of Base is the first number in act two and I find it remarkable - the restraint, the multiple layers of interpretation, and the irony of the chorus."

The production does not really exploit contemporary parallels such as recent natural disasters for the 1755 Lisbon earthquake or the financial crisis for everyone's squandering of money. If you don't know the book, it might sometimes be hard work - and even if you do, there are some long monologues to suffer.

So when Pangloss, Candide's teacher who interprets everything as "for the best", realises his life has been a litany of disappointments, what else can he do but wash down lemon sorbets in Constantinople with an upliftingly awful yodel? The audience happily joins in.