A "sinister comedy about revenge and line dancing . . ." - the word comedy blinked like a beacon from the press release for The Hanging Tree (The Furnace, Aston Place). So far, this year's Fringe has not been for the fainthearted: we've had all the big subjects, from death to sex to Gaybo. As it turned out, the new production from the Glaswegian company, Look Out, was a bleak urban drama set on a housing estate in west Scotland, in a community subdued by unemployment and torn apart by drugs, alcohol and violent crime. It could have been many parts of Dublin.
This talented company, which is committed to the development of new writing, brought Entertaining Angels to the Fringe last year. Unfortunately, a programming error which listed The Hanging Tree under the wrong date meant that few people got to see its three-night run. On Saturday, one of the actors was out of action and the play's author and director, Nicola McCartney, had to step in, but this didn't seem to put the other actors out, disrupt the pace, or dissipate the gripping intensity of the piece.
The theme of the Wild West was effectively worked through the play, as the high-rise estate was depicted as a lawless frontier zone where disputes were settled at gunpoint, while the main protagonist (Alan McQueen), a former police sergeant turned violent vigilante, had a nostalgic obsession with John Wayne.
The bankruptcy and destructiveness of this society's construction of masculinity - all hard-drinking, jeering aggression - was superbly revealed, while the female characters had a pragmatic instinct for survival which gave them enough courage to belittle these deluded men constantly, but not enough to stop propping them up, or to leave them. And the line dancing? That was the comedy: brilliant, po-faced and black.
There's almost two weeks left to locate the welcoming artists' studio complex, Space 28, to see A Kaddish, (Seeking The Lost) (28 North Lotts, behind Bachelor's Walk, until October 18th). A piece of devised theatre, directed by Gerry Morgan, which the Galloping Cat company has spent two-and-a-half years creating, this is less a play about the Holocaust, or Shoah, than an intensely vivid evocation of it, through music, song and voices bearing witness.
The question of how to make art about Auschwitz, or whether it could or should be done, was one which dominated the post-war decades. Now we all carry certain fixed images of that catastrophe, a kind of visual shorthand, which we think we know. This is what Galloping Cat's piece is attempting to subvert, to bring to life the shock of individual experience. To do this, the company returned to the first-hand accounts of survivors such as Charlotte Delbo and Primo Levi.
A chronological narrative loosely forms an arc over a series of 23 linked scenes, from Weimar Berlin, through the beginnings of the Nazi policy of racial purity, to the mass transportation to the camps. Speaking individually and in chorus, 12 young performers cluster and scatter through this low-beamed, white-washed warehouse space, weaving and pairing in perfectly choreographed sequences to a blend of acoustic and electronic music, composed by Eanna Hickey. Traditional Jewish chants and the music of the ghettos combine to create a moving threnody. It's a lament for the suffering and death, the loss of innocence and humanity in the camps and, for those who managed to survive, "the loss of the faculty of dreaming". This is an extremely impressive work, appropriately grave and dignified, yet full of lingering beauty.
