With some erstwhile clarinet class chums I went to a lovely concert in the oh so beautiful St Andrew's and St George's West by the Scottish Clarinet Quartet.  The music ranged from Indian raga to a Hebridean wauking melody and we encountered an Australian cartoon character with the delightful name of Vasco Pyjama on the way.

I ran from there to Charlotte Square to hear Michael Luders talk about Blowback.  In this book he argues that the roots of the current calamitous situation in the Middle East lie in past western interference. I'm 100% with him on that analysis but it's solutions we need and he offered none other than the passage of time.

Before our last performance of Outside Mullingar (received rapturously to exaggerate only a little) the cast watched Arkle's other show The Fair Intellectual Club.  This is a cheerful little comedy written by a twentieth century comedian Lucy Porter (who came along on her night off from stand-up) about an eighteenth century club for ladies who aspired to more than needlework.  Both shows played to good houses and were favourably reviewed here and here.

Sunday lunch to mellow jazz with friends was followed by The Fall from the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.  The cast come on tightly bunched together and move around the stage swaying and chanting like a Zulu impi.  One after another they break off from the group and introduce themselves.  The group breaks up and we find ourselves in a student meeting discussing the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes from the campus of the University of Cape Town.

The play like the Rhodes Must Fall student movement expands into discussion of the decolonialisation (as they term it) of tertiary education in South Africa and charts much of the student protest there in 2015 and 2016.  The view is put forward that white privilege persists well into post apartheid education and a few swipes are taken along the way at well off blacks and coloureds (represented in the cast).

It's an enormous task to bring education to all in South Africa on an equal basis and this play does well to examine the issue in a vigorous, powerful and entertaining format albeit with little in the way of light and shade.

Summerhall can be relied upon to produce interesting if often baffling theatre.  A good half dozen audience members failed to last the distance at Ivona, Princess of Burgundia and slipped out more or less quietly as the show wore on.  Written by Witold Gombrowicz in 1938, Wikipedia tells me "it describes what the enslavement of form, custom and ceremony brings."

It's set in a royal court where a bored young prince decides for a joke of sorts that he will marry a lumpen, tomgue-tied young woman (played intensely by a strapping six foot lad with unruly locks in shorts and tee shirt).  This is met with severe disapproval by king and queen but they are persuaded to go along with it by their chamberlain on the grounds that it shows the prince as generous and noble-hearted.

That makes the play seem almost rational but it's an absurdist piece so the ebb and flow of the action, the incarnation of the characters, the language and dialogue, the bits and pieces of the in the round staging; all of it, is basically nuts.

I have to say I really enjoyed it though I'd recommend cutting a good thirty minutes.  And what does the aforesaid enslavement bring?  Death by choking on a pike bone in this instance.

Immediately before that I saw Black Mountain which has some affinities with Pinter in its disjointed, or rather uncompleted, dialogues and its sense of unexplained mystery and a growing feeling of menace.

It's superbly presented by Paines Plough in their Roundabout season at Summerhall.  The audience enter a tent full of swirling mists and the show literally cracks into action with a blackout that erupts with a flash and a bang.  The excellent light and sound plot adds great atmosphere throughout.

Rebecca and Philip are a couple who prowl uncomfortably around one another in a remote country retreat avoiding being explicit about their back story but damage has been done somewhere.  A third character, Helen, or is she Heather, appears to Philip and they too have some mutual mystery.

The three characters come together in a triangular confrontation, mist swirls, lights dim, the actors vanish, blackout, lights up to reveal an axe centre stage.

Loved it.

Jogging, part of the Arab season at Summerhall seems pretty straightforward in comparison.  It's a one woman show performed in Arabic with occasional bursts of English and French and projected subtitles clearly visible to all.  The audience are occasionally drawn into the action to read introductory pieces (in English) and in one case a man goes on stage to hold the actress's ankles while she performs some fairly orgasmic sit-ups.

It's quite a physical show because the format is explained as a woman in her fifties jogging around Beirut musing and we share her thoughts. She does run about and she does exercises but in the main storytelling sections she is less active.

She launches into the story of Medea and her murder of her children and segues into the murder (real event?) by a Lebanese woman of her children and her subsequent suicide.  Effected by rat poison in fruit salad and cream, three dishes of which she provides for the audience enjoining them to tuck in after the show.

With references to her sex life with her husband and her erotic dreams about the Lebanese Boris Johnson she gets to the penultimate story about a woman who lost two sons in war with Israel in 2006 and her third son in Syria in recent years. 

That takes us to the boats crossing the Mediterranean in which many sons are lost.

It's an absorbing show if a tad discursive, well performed by someone who in real life I'm sure we'd find feisty.

Nederlands Dans Theater in the EIF are quite simply wonderful.  Three diverse and beautiful, beautiful pieces performed by dancers with bodies so flexible their bones must be made of elastic.  Lovely music, light and sound.  Perfection all round.  But strictly non-narrative.  Make what meaning you will out of them.  Here's a taste.