Edinburgh Festival
Martin Creed's Words and Music
Festival Theatre Studio
Neil Cooper
four stars
THE words 'YES' and 'NO' flash up in turn on a screen at the back of the stage. The array of guitars, speakers and a laptop in front of it suggest an intimate gig of a grassroots persuasion. Whether any of this is still in place by the end of Turner Prize winning polymath Martin Creed's three week late night run remains to be seen. Creed, as he is at pains to point out, doesn't want to repeat himself in any way. In the spirit of such good intentions, no spoiler alerts are required here, for a show which effectively does what it says on the tin, but which finds its eccentric auteur questioning his every action.
“I made some notes,” Creed says, after breezing on with two large jotters under his arm. He looks somewhere between a 1970s social studies lecturer and the same era's edition of Donald Sutherland. “But whatever the opposite of taking notes is, I don't want that.”
Over the next eighty minutes, Creed's obsessively symmetrical lines of inquiry are guffaw-inducingly funny and chin-scratchingly profound. It's as if he is the result of some Frankenstein's monster style experiment that fused Billy Connolly, Albert Einstein and a friendly Mark E Smith, and lived to tell the tale. Creed revels in his own perceived failures, and muses on what might happen if he met himself and was too polite to point out the rubbish he was talking. He explores the soup of his own mind, and sings raw minimalist ditties that put him in attractive opposition to himself. As waywardly joyful as this is, be aware none of it may happen tonight. Visit often.
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 here