When Oliver Emanuel was taken by mind most cancers at 43, one pal noticed that the playwright had “taught us find out how to die”. By all accounts, Emanuel lived his closing months with humour and pragmatism. What’s curious is how a lot of the substantial physique of labor he left behind is preoccupied by grief. In performs similar to Dragon and I Am Tiger, he returned to it repeatedly.
Thus it’s with this posthumous chamber musical, though at first it doesn’t appear so. Written with Gareth Williams, whose piano ballads are a energetic mixture of the heartfelt and wry, it begins as a love story instructed by the medium of paper. With each ticket, menu, procuring checklist, letter and origami fowl comes a staging publish within the romance between neighbours, one a jilted lover (Christopher Jordan-Marshall), the opposite a go-ahead journalist (Emma Mullen).
It’s a fertile theme, one which finds house for a tune about George Wylie’s full-sized paper boat that set sail on the Clyde in 1989, an emblem of outdated business and new creativeness. Just like the pages of a ebook, crammed with feelings, insights and concepts, paper organises our ideas, defines us and carries us into the longer term.
The theme beneficial properties in resonance after we join these ephemeral scraps to a previous we are able to by no means return to. A Historical past of Paper strikes from the ethereal attraction of a pop tune to the unsayable devastation of surprising loss: when tragedy strikes, Jordan-Marshall, just like the boy in Dragon, loses the capability to talk.
In Andrew Panton’s sharply paced and uncluttered manufacturing for Dundee Rep and the Traverse, Mullen and Jordan-Marshall give attractive performances by a sequence of sweetly sung duets and half-acted, half-narrated encounters, all fizz and enjoyable till they aren’t. It’s a pretty piece of labor, all of the extra poignant for Emanuel’s loss.
On the Traverse, Edinburgh, till 25 August; then at Dundee Rep, 29-31 August
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