Monika Pormale is fascinated by the things other people throw out. She picks her way through mounds of discarded hairdryers, bicycle wheels, door hinges and chipped teacups at the Latgalite market in Riga. Suddenly she pounces on something.
“I remember this from my childhood,” she says, caressing a grubby white doorknob, “we had exactly this same kind.” A seller appears, clutching a half-empty bottle of vodka, and starts talking to her in Russian. Disappointed when he can’t persuade her to buy it, he picks out a few other treasures: a calculator, a doorbell and a pair of spectacles with a missing lens.
The market became Pormale’s second home when she was sourcing props for New Riga Theatre’s Long Life, which comes to the Edinburgh International Festival this week.
On paper, the performance does not sound promising; it has no dialogue and follows a day in the life of a group of old people, as they rise, cook, clean, eat, watch television and go to bed. But the well- respected young company has already received rave reviews across Europe, where critics have described it as touching, humorous and life affirming.
Pormale’s set is three adjacent rooms, all crammed full of the inhabitants’ possessions. Baiba Broka and Vilis Daudzins play a Latvian couple, sandwiched between a musician and a Russian couple in a communal flat. “They don’t have anyone except each other and the objects they have stuffed into their homes,” says Daudzins. “Old people gather possessions and they become like old friends to them.”
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Pormale adds: “The actors say that using these things or putting spectacles or earrings on that belonged to an elderly relative helps them get into character.”
That the cast — all in their twenties and early thirties — are able to persuade us of their old age at all is incredible. They don’t use make-up or prosthetics but rely on their ability to mimic the behaviour, facial expressions and movement of the old people they have observed at the market and in the street. “The starting point for a role like this is to imagine the physical problems you might have and then to move your body accordingly,” says Broka. “When you do that it becomes easy to enter your character mentally and emotionally.”
The idea for Long Life came to the director, Alvis Hermanishen, when he was visiting his elderly parents. He asked the five actors to think about their characters and to come back to the rehearsal room to present a series of vignettes. Not everyone was enthusiastic initially. “I remember thinking what a terrible idea, old age is such an uncomfortable subject,” Broka confesses. She is standing inside the communal flat in central Riga which the NRT actor Andis Stords shares with five families and where Hermanis himself used to live. Communal flats are a leftover from Soviet times when the authorities allocated as many as ten families, in one room each, in the large flats formerly occupied by the rich.
The company has gone to great pains to replicate the stench for the performance. “It smells of cooking, frying fish, old fat, dust and the heart pills that old people take that have a very distinctive smell,” Pormale says, adding that it lingers in theatres long after they’ve gone.
Since they started working on Long Life, Broka confesses they have all developed an unhealthy obsession with mortality. “Is there a good cemetery in Edinburgh we can visit?” she wonders, as though asking for a recommendation for a restaurant. “Always when we visit a new city we look first for the cemeteries.”
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Long Life, The Hub, Aug 23- Sept 2 (not Aug 29)