“The music I listened to between the ages of 11 and 21 probably affected by life more than pretty much anything else. It influenced how I dressed, how I spoke, and who I was friends with: it led me to books, films and artists I might never have discovered otherwise. For better and worse, it made me what I am today.” So you can become “lost” in music, and yet also “find” yourself through it.
Designer Karen Tennent drapes microphone stands and the instruments in ivy, suggesting a romantic folly in moonlight.
That, at least, appears to be the idea at the heart of the award-winning Magnetic North theatre company’s latest production, a collaboration between the company’s artistic director Nicholas Bone, composer Kim Moore, musicians and numerous young people. The result is what is apparently now called “gig theatre”: in which a dramatic story is told through words, songs and (in this case) some nifty video images created live on stage. There’s not so much set as set dressing—designer Karen Tennent drapes microphone stands and the instruments in ivy, with Simon Wilkinson’s lighting design suggesting a romantic folly in moonlight.
The songs – written by Moore along with performers Jill O’Sullivan (violin and guitar), Alex Neilson (percussion), Emily Philips (violin and clarinet), and Claire Willoughby (violin and saxophone) – focus both on ancient Greek mythology and the complex relationships between two participating groups of secondary school students from Glasgow and Edinburgh (whose sampled voices are incorporated into several of the tracks) and the music in their lives. In terms of performance there is little to fault, technically; Neilson, in particular, creates a remarkable fluidity and range of percussive sound and rhythms, while the three women sing, speak and play with real dexterity.
But (and yes, this entire review has been hurtling towards a “but”) while the folk rock music – arguably too reliant on reverb, and amped up too harshly – is a matter of taste, this certainly ranks among the least emotive and involving retellings of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth that I’ve ever come across. As for the brief, singular and unsubtle intrusion of the performers’ own thoughts on music and Greek myths, they are unexpectedly tossed into the proceedings like a large stone into the middle of a frozen pond, breaking the metaphorical ice and the strength of the whole piece.
According to the programme notes, this production is the result of “over three years of development and workshops with young musicians”, some of whom join the main cast on stage for the alleged musical climax. Hopefully, they enjoyed the experience and have genuinely grown from being involved, for there was limited benefit from this Music not lost on its audience; sadly, a classic example of something being far less than the sum of its parts.
