La Reprise: Histoire(s) du theatre (1)
The Lyceum Theatre
Edinburgh
★★★★

If the subtitle of this Belgium import does not make you pause, then to know that it is the product of Milo Rau’s international Institute of Political Murder could turn away many a theatre enthusiast. This is, however, the Edinburgh Festival part of its intention being to introduce the new, even the provocative.

Theatre has always engaged with reality but modern theatre from Brecht and Becket has self-consciously examined how the mechanics of the art work.

Milo Rau’s ambitious Ghent Manifesto sets out the rules by which he hopes to break through the artifice of the stage to “make the representation itself real.”

La Reprise takes as his focus the brutal and senseless murder of a young Belgian homosexual in 2012 but the production is as much about how theatre can do more than tell the story.

Conventional acting we are told is like delivering a pizza, the actors inhabit their roles like their costumes. So we witness the auditions for the key parts, in the process exploring the psychology of the various hopefuls.

The use of film, mostly of the actions on stage below the screen, subtly comments on the plasticity imposed by the camera. This is brought home when after a conventional film clip of the victim’s desperately anxious mother and father in bed, the actors sit on stage naked, revealing emotions as cruelly stripped as their bodies.

One character, the boyfriend, attends the killers’ trial in the hopeless need not only to understand the banality of the evil but to experience the fear and the pain endured by the victim, while the actual section dealing with the crime is truly horrifying.

Ironically, however, despite the innovative staging, it remains theatre, we are still having to suspend our disbelief.

Theatre, nature’s mirror, can raise vital questions, but it is not and can never be reality.