Part audio-play, part wander around the West end of the city, this is an excellent musing on love and family that would benefit from keeping it simple in the site-specific department. Its weaving of myth with personal and private history is brilliantly conceived and carried out, but spending time in small rooms with strangers in oversized headphones took away some of the magic.We are taken to various spaces and rooms that littered with the paraphernalia of lives and loves - photographs, postcards, locks of hair - as well as artwork both dinkily handmade and more substantial. This ‘specific’ part of site-specific worked well, giving a touching physical reality to the events that we could hear through our headphones. But the ‘site’ part was more clunky and not sufficiently closely tied to the story. A room in a churchyard, an empty pub, the garden of a hotel: all very well if the events of the audio play definitely occurred in those exact places, but they don’t. Edinburgh itself does feature fairly prominently in the play, but some of the action occurs in Russia or in Scotland more generally. I didn’t feel that awkwardly sitting at a pub table really added anything to my experience. The production would have been more wonderful, engaging, (and still multi-media) had we been sat in one room the whole time, albeit surrounded by all the brilliant bits and pieces they had made and sourced to give substance to the story.Having said that, one last word must go on the audio play itself. At times moving and funny, the way that it took one modern relationship between two people of different cultures and contextualised it against family and national history was inspired. Dialogue was realistic and characters well drawn. Part narrative, part kaleidoscopic picture of love, marriage, and family, it was simply enchanting. I would have loved to just absorb it and its accessories in a dry, warm room.
