13/08/23

Summerhall, (Demonstration Room), Edinburgh

Concerned Others is a meditation on addiction – a vast, sometimes overwhelming subject for which there really are no ready answers. Tortoise In a Nutshell approaches the subject from a different perspective – using an intimate table-top performance, above which spoken verbatim dialogue is also displayed on a series of screens, while immersive music plays.

A miniature camera glides cinematically past rows of tiny houses and intricately detailed miniature figures as the words spill onto the screens. The effect, curiously, is to focus my attention on what’s actually being said and while it’s not saying much that I haven’t heard before, it does have the effect of making me concentrate. No easy matter when I’m sitting in the Demonstration Room, arguably the most uncomfortable venue of the Fringe.

Now the scene shifts to a character whose face is a video screen, a vapid smile interspersed with mixed-up advertising videos extolling the virtues of various beers, and I’m reminded of my youth, when television adverts like these ones made me long to look old enough to go into a pub and buy a drink.

Again, we’re back to the little camera, which now glides through a series of empty rooms, emphasising the loneliness and desolation of addiction, the fact that so many people are obliged to face it alone…

By the conclusion – which somehow manages to end on a rising note of optimism about the future – I leave thinking about the ubiquity of addiction, it’s prevalence and it’s many different forms. We’re all of us addicted to something, aren’t we?

You could argue that perhaps Concerned Others could delve a little deeper into its chosen subject but there’s no mistaking the superb and affecting style in which this story is told.

4 stars

Philip Caveney