The War

The King’s Theatre

Edinburgh International Festival

4/5

One might believe at an interval-less two-and-a-half hours, that Vladimir Pankov’s Chekhov International Theatre Festival “SounDrama” is designed to inflict a level of attrition on its audiences mirroring that of the first world war conflict it pictures.

SounDrama because Mickhail Fateev’s and Anton Feshin’s sound design bombards the audience with an ear-threatening collage which conveys quite as much of the import of this epic lament as the side titled translation of the Russian and Greek text.

We travel from pre-war Proustian Paris where the privileged set gaily party and philosophise over the pros and cons of a war, never imagining the true horrors about to explode into their lives.

Pankov has counterpointed a narrative drawn from the revolutionary poet, Nikolai Gumilyov and the English novelist, Richard Aldington with sections from Homer’s classic The Iliad.

The visual impact is as stunning as the soundscape. Characters are drawn aloft singing like corrupted angels or dangling like corpses as we recap the experiences of George, one of the youth generation lost in the mass slaughter of the trenches.

His journey from heroic illusion to ghastly reality captures the nightmare experiences of the front including the deadly impact of gas attack. A threeminute silence in the midst of the sound barrage is all the more effective in conveying the tension driving the action.

At times we are watching a cruel operatic ballet with the large cast choreographed to perfection. As the battles pause before the next conflict fuelled by “false ideals and stupidity,” the anguish of George’s parents is reflected in the keening of Hecuba, the mother of the Trojan hero Hector.

Theatre can rarely compete with film in treating the physical realities of warfare but here Pankov and his hugely talented company have welded myth and reality into a tapestry of dramatic sound, vision and movement which works with the power of a great theatre poem.

The War is moreover a work which provides a critical demolition of the hypocritical remembrance cavortings we are daily bombarded with by a media full of the latest inhumanity of man to man.

Until August 31 2014/ Box office (0131) 473-2000.