Bull/Fight, by the Edinburgh-based Mythography Collective with Macrobert Arts Centre, is an ambitious story involving enormous emotions, told within a tiny physical space. Set in Andalucía in 1936, and covering the death of poet Federico Lorca, this is a piece that attempts to embody raw passion, poetry, and the extent of suffering in the Spanish Civil War.
The troupe’s transformation of their compact space within the Summerhall complex is extraordinarily effective. Poles delineate a stage; lighting, recorded sound, and textiles induce a mood; clapping rhythms establish a sense of place. The line between actor and crew is blurred as six players move in careful balletic choreography through the space, taking advantage of the intimacy between actor and audience to use their faces to radiate quiet ecstasy and pain. With the addition of well-considered touches like polyphonic humming, they often convincingly achieve the feel of a primal, primordial spirit.
Meaning in this production emerges more from layering than direct narrative. Beyond establishing the basics that the group is a travelling theatre troupe, the larger themes about creation and destruction, power and suffering, are revealed and examined gradually, returning periodically to the metaphor of the bull and the bullfighter.
The first half or so of Bull/Fight is hypnotically intriguing. Doggedly earnest in pursuit of the sombre, it avoids tipping into bathos and remains grounded through its small human interactions and jabs at political repression amid the more poetic language.
Towards the end, however, the focus changes toward abstraction. Long stretches consist of a writhing cluster of uniformly grey-clad actors chanting overwrought phrases and engaging in a catechism of recited barbarities. The content of their recounted litany is, of course, absolutely horrific. But the unrelenting onslaught is, past a certain point, simply numbing. Keeping the emotional volume dialled up to maximum allows no dynamism, no chance for recovery and then a second punch of feeling. It’s too much, and the often bombastic monotony of it counterintuitively undercuts what are surely the director’s intentions.
The anti-war sentiments of Bull/Fight and its final note of optimism are, of course, noble. However, an intensely direct, bludgeoning approach is not necessarily the most effective, either artistically or politically, and some leavening, or at least subtlety, could go a long way toward achieving their goals.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
