Deep under the main streets in Paradise in Augustine’s The Snug, BEARESTEATRO produce Los Años Maravillosos: Archive, Image and Collapse, a brief multimedia performance combining archival research, live performance, and slides to comment on the detritus left behind by tragedies.
Los Años Maravillosos jumps around in time, never situated at one point in history but constantly referencing different pasts, seemingly to reflect on our dissociated present. Beginning in 1971, a young model from Uruguay gives an interview about what kind of future she sees for herself, including a mention of a recent marriage which she had apparently been keeping quiet. She comments to the reporter who asks about it, “You’ve been doing your research”. Then we leap to 1997, the model Lillian now on her third divorce and mother to three children. She repeats that she was never sure if she wanted to be a mother. A painful birth scene suggests she did not, and she is never really involved with her children as characters onstage. Instead, she becomes involved in reports of the tragic death of Princess Diana in Paris. News reports seem to deeply move her while at the same time crumbling her reality further.
The performance is purposefully intimate in The Snug, a very small space with only one performer and few props, being held together mostly by the projections on a high screen. The single performer onstage demonstrates a well of deep emotion without turning to bombast, a moving subtle performance at times. Unfortunately, the show is unable to hold up under the weight of the deconstructivist film theory that underpins its press release. BEARESTEATRO claim that the archival material and surrealist script explore the distance between our imagined futures and our present pasts, noting the inability to reconstruct the past and arguing that this only destabilises the process. This is a very lofty ambition and the 30-minute production manages only to provide a confusing interview between a pre-recorded voice and the live performer, a lengthy birth scene, and then a confusing sequence in which the performer struggles to encase plastic containers in cling film. I wondered why she was not supplied with the lids, or why the process was not more choreographed and stylised instead. Experimental solo shows are an important vein of Edinburgh Fringe, but this solo show has not found the balance between onstage work, recorded snippets, and academic thinking.
BEARESTEATRO’s Los Años Maravillosos: Archive, Image and Collapse plays through the end of the festival at Paradise in Augustine’s The Snug.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
