DANCE

By Mark Brown

The Mother

EICC, Edinburgh

Five stars

At Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, June 20-22

In a recent interview I conducted with the award-winning Turkish theatre director Murat Daltaban (who is now living and working in Edinburgh, as well as his native Istanbul), he described Scotland’s capital as “an international theatre space”, rather than a merely local one. If we needed a reminder that Edinburgh’s international artistic status is year-round (rather than limited to the festival month of August) we had it in the world premiere, late last month, of the extraordinary dance-theatre piece The Mother, starring the great, Russian ballerina Natalia Osipova.

Inspired by the graphic novella Storia Di Una Madre (Story Of A Mother) by the Italian artist AkaB, and by the Hans Christian Andersen tale upon which it was based, Portuguese-South African choreographer/director Arthur Pita’s production seems destined for global acclaim. It transposes Andersen’s story of a mother pursuing Death (which has taken her infant child) across a freezing landscape to the home (and, more importantly, the mind) of a young mother who is, it seems, in the grip of post-natal depression.

When we first meet Osipova’s Mother she is sitting in the symbolically dilapidated bedroom that she shares with her baby. The child cries in distress, the Mother is racked with anxiety.

Like Andersen’s harrowing fairytale (which Pita and dramatist Anna Rulevskaya have adapted liberally), the choreography is episodic. The distraught Mother encounters no fewer than seven characters; ranging from Death to the Ferryman (who demands the young woman’s eyes as the price of her passage) and, finally (and movingly), her lover.

All of these other characters (male and female) are played by the exceptional English dancer Jonathan Goddard. The story may be Danish, but the production has a Russian soul; a point underlined in The Mother’s anguished interactions with Goddard’s unnervingly ambiguous, faceless Babushka.

In Andersen’s tale, The Mother makes a journey that is both physical and metaphorical, through a wintry landscape, encountering a series of anthropomorphised figures (such as a bramble bush which demands to be nurtured against the freezing temperatures, requiring The Mother to cut herself upon its thorns). Here, the metaphors are taken to a powerful psychological and emotional conclusion.

Osipova’s Mother encounters each of these characters in the three rooms (bedroom, bathroom and kitchen) of her own home. These are represented with bleak brilliance on designer Yann Seabra’s impressive revolving stage (which is given intelligent, atmospheric lighting by David Platter).

The effect of the young woman’s journey taking place entirely within her domestic space is to heighten the metaphorical implications of Andersen’s story (this is a journey in the mind of The Mother). It also tilts the narrative somewhat away from its original, allegorical religiosity and towards a deeply affecting empathy with the sometimes catastrophic anxieties and terrors of the post-natal condition.

It speaks volumes about the artistic ambition and integrity of Osipova (once of the Bolshoi, now a principal dancer with The Royal Ballet in London) that, not content with dancing the great roles of classical ballet, she is driven to make experimental work such as this. She dances the role of The Mother with a grace and physical virtuosity that one would expect of one of the world’s finest ballerinas.

However, dancing to a superb, emotionally attuned live score (composed and performed by Dave Price and Frank Moon), she also exhibits a raw, soul-shuddering capacity for reaching human emotion at its very furthest reaches that is required only rarely by ballet. Here, there is a powerful paradox in the extraordinary control and precision required in order to achieve her character’s overwhelming, sometimes terrifyingly painful, moments of frantic fear and frenetic distraction.

The result of this fascinating melding of Osipova’s classical training with her interest in the possibilities of contemporary physical theatre is one of the most profoundly moving and emotionally compelling dance performances you are ever likely to see.