Divine Invention
Summerhall, Edinburgh

SERGIO BLANCO’s one-man show Divine Invention is part performance lecture, part fictionalised autobiographical memoir. For 65 minutes it draws us in, folding and twisting us through the fabric of its truth. 

A man sits at his desk surrounded by props which we read as if reading a film-screen. A notebook, an art-card of a Francis Bacon painting, a microscope (mystifying, and ultimately ultimately enlightening) — objects that encourage us to draw connections. 

Then he begins to read the text of a lecture. Everything is read, everything is laid out for us. The whole process is hypnotic — helped in no small manner by the man’s piercingly restless way with us. We find ourselves in a transitional space in which everything is real. 

The man at the desk is at once the actor, Daniel Goldman, and Blanco’s translator and regular collaborator — adding a further fold to this intriguing mix of being and seeming. Is he the performer, or the performer playing the author? 

Blanco is a master of world-weaving. Anyone who experienced Thebes Land, his (and Goldman’s) award-winning play in London a few years ago will tell you so. 

The tale before us is supposedly a response to Romeo and Juliet, ostensibly commissioned by the Globe Theatre. Stories of trauma, pain, sex, the death of love and the transcendental passion of solving life’s problems through writing, move and penetrate each other. It is an alchemical mix of musings on the Shakespearean tragedy that places us in the midst of the swirl, constructed meticulously to make sure that we never miss an important detail. We are intimate with him.

We are told what exactly will happen. We are not told what will transpire. We do not know how we will be involved — but involved we most certainly are. A Lorca quote appears: “And in my heart I felt/ Sharp needles/ That opened up wounds,/ Red like wallflowers.” The central tragedy in this tale of the death of love is profoundly moving. 

But did it really happen? This deceptively simple show is what theatre is all about and it demands to be experienced.

Runs until August 11. Box office: (0131) 560-1580, boxoffice@summerhall.co.uk.