Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: A Toy Theater Atlas
C Arts, Edinburgh Fringe
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“YOU take delight not in a city’s seven or 70 wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.“ So says Kublai Khan to Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s cult classic Invisible Cities. 

There are many levels the book can be read at; as a bedtime story, letting the fantastical places come into view for the briefest of moments before they dissolve, like dreams, into the ether. Or you could read it as a philosophical novel, picking apart the conversations for deeper timeless truths. 

Still more it could be read as sociology, an examination of the way that all cities are being pulled by the gravity of humanity, allowing us to recognise our own cities in the exotic and vice versa. 

To bring such an idiosyncratic book of multiple layers to the stage is no easy task, and yet this is what the Toy Atlas Theatre have done with remarkable ingenuity. 

Written and performed by Matthew Gawryk and Dan Kerr-Hobert, for whom this is an evident labour of love, each city is contained in bespoke miniature boxes which are opened up and explored in concert with the narrative. 

It begins with moving paper cutouts but, as each city opens up, we become entranced by the unique mechanics of each box, from tiny music boxes, to clockwork, to light illusions and dioramas.

It is not only the variety of the physical form of each box, but the artistic choices made by the performers that alternates between the literal and the abstract and, very occasionally, that makes metaphor explicit. In this sense, we come to appreciate the many layers of Calvino’s book. 

One of the famous moments in the book is when Kublai Khan states that he has “constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,” to which Polo’s response is to speak instead of “a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions.”

It is an exchange that highlights the tension of structure and innovation, and a perfect way to place this adaption. For of course, this is a performance whose own construction must fit into certain parameters of Fringe theatre, a stage, a facing audience, an hour slot. Yet it is also a most wonderful exception. 

Located within the avant-garde of puppetry (there are no marionettes or muppets here, just the precise physical manipulation of objects on stage) and making tangible a book known for its ethereal prose, this production truly achieves a dreamlike effect.

Runs until August 30. Tickets: edfringe.com.