Tabula Rasa

Seen at Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh;

Playing Tramway, Glasgow

November 22-24

Reviewed by Mark Brown

FROM the moment it was established in 1999, it was clear that Glasgow-based theatre company Vanishing Point was part of a tradition of distinctly European, modernist work which was still relatively new among Scottish theatremakers. Like their predecessors, the great (now, sadly, occasional) touring company Communicado and the celebrated (now-defunct) group Suspect Culture, director Matthew Lenton and his collaborators placed an emphasis on the tremendous possibilities of the visual imagination and the power of music in the theatre.

There have been excellent successes, such as the glorious fantasia Lost Ones (2005-06) and the charming biographical play The Beautiful Cosmos Of Ivor Cutler (a co-production with the National Theatre of Scotland in 2014-15). Interiors (which enjoyed considerable international success between 2009 and 2016) gave expression to the company's imagistic brilliance.

However, there have been times when the form has been much stronger than the narrative content (such as Wonderland in 2012) or when the work has seemed simply misconceived (Little Otik, another co-production with the NTS, in 2008). Whether their shows have been stunning successes or accomplished failures, Vanishing Point's work has always been ambitious, brave and original.

Music (from rock opera to Bela Bartok) has long played an important part in the company's work. It comes as little surprise, therefore, that it is now collaborating with the classical string group the Scottish Ensemble in making Tabula Rasa, a music-theatre piece inspired by and incorporating live performance of the music of the extraordinary Estonian composer Arvo Part.

The 82-year-old's profoundly spiritual music no doubt owes a massive debt to his relationship with his Christian faith (like the late English composer John Tavener, Part is a convert to the Russian Orthodox Church). However, the expressions of wonder, moral elevation and pain in his compositions are both human and humane, making them ripe for a secular staging such as this.

The show (which is directed by Lenton and co-authored by him and, lead actor of the piece, Pauline Goldsmith) isn't so much musical theatre as a concert of Part's music interspersed with theatrical meditations, or vice versa. Goldsmith narrates in the character of a woman recently returned from the funeral of a close friend. Her thoughts on the life and death of Peter, and upon our society's uneasy relationship with death and dying, are put on hold from time to time, to allow the Ensemble and pianist Sophia Rahman to play pieces from Part's oeuvre.

The effect is genuinely soothing. It is not difficult, after all, to connect one's own experience of bereavement and grief with the transcendence which is implicit in the composer's music.

Lenton and Goldsmith's text walks a careful line between conventional observation and poetic language. Speaking a monologue that is flecked with no-nonsense humour, Goldsmith's nicely weighted, neatly played character has shades of the hostess in her acclaimed one-woman show Bright Colours Only.

Engaging, touching and gently comic though the script is, it is almost inevitable that it seems a little insubstantial when placed beside the boundless spiritual possibilities of Part's music. Astronauts have spoken of their sense of insignificance when set against the vastness of the universe. Similarly, the theatrical offering here feels uncomfortably slight when compared with the beautifully played compositions.

The design (by Lenton and, his longstanding collaborator, lighting designer Kai Fischer) displays the combination of exquisite subtlety and visual spectacle one has come to expect of Vanishing Point. The opening up of an ethereal hospital room at the back of the stage, where Sarah Short's sympathetic nurse reads to Peter (represented by a glowing, white mannequin), creates the show's most memorable visual image.