Captured by John Young 

Financial Times, August 28, 1996, p. 9.


Edinburgh 96 [Arts Festival]

Theatre: Iberians out on a limb

By Martin Hoyle


A naked man with his head in an aquarium tank is drenched by a 
spray from between the thighs of a red PVC bikini-clad woman. He is 
on a trolley that is pushed across the stage by a woman with shaggy 
blonde hair about 20 feet long, borne like a train in the mouth of 
another naked man who crawls after her. They pass a sailing ship 
going in the other direction.

A tenor belts out something incomprehensible as the door to a large 
fridge-freezer is repeatedly opened and slammed shut on two naked 
men in a variety of positions who shriek with surprise each time. A 
man in red PVC trousers with a large prawn on his back dances on a 
wardrobe goading the percussionist inside to a fury. A young man 
flies around on a wire playing the violin and flirts with the evening's 
protagonist: a player piano that moves across the stage by itself, its 
little keys bouncing autonomously away. Sometimes a woman in 
black PVC sits on it and gargles, showing her cleavage. The woman 
with shag-pile hair reappears. She spends much time in a huge bed 
flanked by high-heel shoes as big as sentry-boxes. A man shouts at 
her in what fitfully emerges as American English, no more 
intelligible than the Catalan of the rest of the show. She clucks like a 
chicken as he stands on his head. Six elderly (Edin)burghers sitting 
in front of me walk out. 

Two men have their crotches stroked by hands that protrude from the 
wings. They jiggle with one another then do something mercifully 
hidden from us to the obliging handmaidens.

I sometimes think that Spain's post-Franco moral liberation has gone 
rather too far. *The Splendid Shame of the Deed Badly Done*, to 
translate into English (not that anybody does during the hour's traffic 
of this particularly congested stage) is written, composed, directed 
and designed by Carles Santos. Suppressing an urge to exhort him to 
seek a second opinion, one can only admire the wonderful technical 
skill with which trolleys, wardrobes, deep-freezes, tables and sailing 
ships, besides the star pianola, whizz to and fro in the King's Theatre. 

The company is energetic and patently does not take itself too 
seriously or imperil the physical well-being of the audience. I have no 
idea what they are on about but at less than 60 minutes this is no 
great tragedy. Programme remarks let slip that the shag-pile haired 
lady has to live horizontally since living vertically would cause her 
death. Personally, I find the whole thing reminiscent of those parties 
attended by junior ministers that one reads about in the less cerebral 
Sunday papers. Just what international arts festivals need more of. 
Ole!

[End]

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