21/08/23

Pleasance EICC (Lennox Theatre), Edinburgh

Once in a while, you chance upon a show at the Fringe that almost defies description. Dark Noon is one such show, but I’m a reviewer so I’m going to give it my best shot. This extraordinary co-production between Danish director Tue Biering and South African director and choreographer Nhianhia Mahlangu, is an epic recreation of the American West, seen through the eyes of not the victors but the vanquished – the people from whom the country was stolen.

It’s a shattering, exhilarating experience.

On a dusty expanse of ground, two gunfighters face each other in a scene that could have been plucked from a Sergio Leone movie. They shoot each other and fall in slow-mo – and then, the big screen that hangs over the massive horseshoe stage flickers into life and and actor Lilian Tshabalala talks directly to camera, telling us that we are about to see the story of one place, told in chapters.

We watch the seven-strong company as they race back and forth in a variety of guises, talking, singing, dancing – sometimes dragging members of the audience onto the stage to help create crowd scenes. At first, the actors are figures in an empty landscape but, as the story unfolds, they somehow manage to create a railroad, and then an entire Frontier town, which grows up one structure at a time, as necessity dictates: a homestead, a jail, a store, a brothel, a church and, perhaps inevitably, a bank. The sheer ambition of the undertaking is jaw-dropping.

Along the way, we witness the awful fate of the Native Americans, shot, exploited and eventually locked safely away behind wire fences; we see the mainly Black cast don ‘whiteface’ in order to assert authority over others. We see scenes of casual racism and are witness to fights and rapes and robberies. One by one, all the cosy myths of Western movies are blown to smithereens, right in front of our eyes. Occasionally, even the cavernous reaches of the Lennox Theatre struggle to contain so much action.

This is a unique piece of devised theatre, sprawling and multi-faceted. It’s sometimes funny, but more often it’s shocking and humbling. At the conclusion, the sell-out crowd rises to its collective feet and the applause reverberates around the room like thunder.

Watching this in the final week of Fringe makes me wish I’d seen it earlier, so I could have urged even more people to go and immerse themselves in it. It’s a wonder to behold.

5 stars

Philip Caveney