Kirsty Findlay and Bethany Tennick in Islander: A New Musical at Summerhall @ Roundabout, Edinburgh. Picture: Jazzy Earl MA CHOICES
Islander: A New Musical continues at Summerhall @ Roundabout, Edinburgh until 25 August 2019.
Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
This is the third Finn Anderson work I have seen – Mother’s Song (2018) and City of Dreams (2019) for the Royal Conservatoire and now Islander, originally developed with Comar which brings together arts across Mull and Iona and now produced in Edinburgh at Summerhall as part of Made in Scotland by Helen Milne.
The production played to a packed and rapt house in the beautiful Roundabout Theatre designed by Lucy Osborne and Emma Chapman. It is a joyful space to enter and allows us to witness the shared magic that theatre can have. I talk lots about necessary theatre, the need for there to be a reason to take one hour out of our lives to be in the presence of strangers in an event. Just sometimes it is for the joy of witnessing mastery of many crafts coming together.
Here we have a completely new myth fashioned from the fear of losing our way of life in an island community, and the ineffable feeling that there is some way we have lost touch with the sea, our fellow creatures, and the way this planet can sustain new life.
Then you have a beautiful evocative score and lyrical poetic storytelling soundscape from Finn Anderson, with a book by Stewart Melton. Directed and fashioned with Amy Draper, the piece allows the world of a tiny island and a vast ocean to be populated by two singers/actors with the help of masterly loops, two mics and an empty flight case. Kirsty Findlay and Bethany Tennick are wonderfully present, emotional, powerful and light-hearted fashioners of the world, rounded off by lighting from Simon Wilkinson.
These eight creatives offer us an outer world of welcome, a theatrical world to open our senses and a mythic majesty for us to wonder about which is often, like our futures, “shrouded in mist and invisible by day”. I sense this will have a global life and it is most fitting to be a piece of musical theatre celebrated in the Made in Scotland programme.
Chris Grady
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