★★★★☆
Gecko has perfected an imaginative brand of physical theatre that tells stories through a fluid combination of charged movement and strong visual design. Directed by the British company’s long-time associate director Rich Rusk, this collaboration with performers from Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre is a vivid, enthralling take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream but is also influenced by The Peony Pavilion, a classic text by Shakespeare’s Chinese contemporary Tang Xianzu.
The focus is on the character of Helena, one of the Bard’s four confused young lovers. Here she becomes an unhappy, unassertive and romantically unattached drone toiling at a corporate office, pining for her indifferent boss Demetrius but completely overshadowed by the glamorous and popular Hermia. The scenario taps into a modern-day Chinese social context in which pressure is still often applied to unmarried young women. Oberon, Titania and the Fairies function as they normally would as the forces that oversee and shape Helena’s destiny but also as handy scenery-shifters.
Tang’s tale, less familiar to Western audiences, is more lightly referenced as a book Helena is reading of which we see fragments as shadow play.
Rusk and his team serve up a production that has all the Gecko hallmarks of quick transformation and sensation, including a driving recorded score (by Dave Price) vitally punctuated by the violinist Ni Peiwen’s live playing. Puck is pure light, bright yellow and zapping round Rhys Jarman’s two-tiered, scaffolding-like set that curves behind a bare central playing area. It’s a sign of the show’s success that although the nine actors speak almost entirely in Mandarin, the narrative and the feelings inside it are readable and convincing within Gecko’s trademark swirling, heightened style.
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Crucially, Yang Ziyi is a wonderful Helena, sweetly sad and anxious but with a gradually thriving inner spirit.
Box office: 0131 556 6550, to August 15