Crystal Bennes reviews the plethora of questions that is After the Rainfall at Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh.
A few months ago I visited the Neues Museum for the first time since its restoration by British architect David Chipperfield in 2009. A classicist by training, I remember standing in front of one cabinet feeling slightly appalled by the cheek of display texts lamenting the loss of certain antiquities to Russia in the years after WW2, as if Germany was the rightful owner of these ancient treasures.
Given that much of Curious Directive's new show, After the Rainfall, is linked by a narrative thread with the return of the Rosetta Stone to Egypt at its core, I imagine I'm not alone in feeling a sense of injustice at the thought of the cultural treasures of many non-Western countries helping to rack-up visitor numbers in Europe's major museums.
The stated ambition of Curious Directive is to use theatre to communicate scientific ideas - this particular show is even funded by the Wellcome Trust. Though as a science enthusiast myself, the communication of scientific ideas don't come through clearly enough in the show. It is nevertheless a captivating piece of theatre, only, if one of the company's aims for the show was to explain or communicate some scientific concept, I'd have to say it rather fails on this account.
We are however, meant to glean the impression that the show is trying to tell us that human communication and the spread of ideas has something to do with the means by which ants communicate with each other. But the play never offers any kind of explanation for how ants actually communicate with each other and so we can't judge whether the metaphor is a satisfactory one.
What the show does brilliantly, however, is make the case for the ills of post-colonialism, particularly with regards to cultural artefacts and national identity by weaving together the story of an English government official in 50s Egypt, gathering intelligence about the possibility of transporting nuclear warheads down the Suez canal; a Cumbrian art student who creates a sculptural piece inspired by ant colonies and the closure of the local mines in the late 80s; a young Egyptian girl who travels to London in 2012 to see the Rosetta Stone after her brother dies in the Egyptian uprising defending the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. And it cleverly adds a future scenario imagining the depositing of Britain's nuclear waste in the Saharan Desert in 2022 in exchange for vast fields of solar panels to power Egyptian cities.
Despite strong performances from a talented cast, After the Rainfall felt like it needed a forceful hand to rein in its many ideas. While artefacts plus communication plus Egypt's post-colonial history is interesting, I wondered whether the mining narrative wasn't superfluous (even though I loved the characters) and the attempt to crowbar in the bit about how ants communicate gratuitous (hence the science felt rather non-existent).
The fragmented narrative can be a powerful theatrical trope, but you have to take care to ensure that the fragments are fully realised. Sometimes the audience needs more than ideas, than questions and too often theatre companies are happy to ask big questions without attempting to answer them. Having said that, I don't think the flaws in After the Rainfall were because Curious Directive didn't answer its own questions but because they asked too many in the first place. Fewer ideas more thoroughly explored and this would have been a near-perfect piece of theatre.
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