7 Assilon Place
C, Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Group: Talia Theatre

Shirley Dent

Biomechanics, a 1920s technique for physically training actors developed by the Russian, Meyerhold, in a play about asylum seekers? Yes. 'Blimey' is what I thought too.

But this is a brilliant exploration of the awful pantomime that human beings are forced to parade in, which we dignify with the name of the asylum system. Once you get past the over-extended bizarreness of the technique, which uses the actor's physicality as a conduit for expressing emotion, you sink into a world of tug-and-pull drama, where a telephone call can literally collapse a character into a heap or lock them into knots of suspense.

The Biomechanics technique finds a wonderful synergy with the subject matter in this play. This is particularly powerful in the asylum interviews scenes. Asylum seekers are made to prostitute and parade themselves, their lives and their stories in front of faceless bueeaucrats. Using the Biomechanics technique, Talia Theatre shows us the emotions of characters turned into puppets and put through the wringer of a system that makes them dance - almost literally in the case of one character, Margaret - through a nightmare system of bureaucratic hoops.

The use of multimedia in theatre is often simply an elastoplast covering over lack of imagination and skill. But when Talia Theatre takes us on a journey of human migration through the ages, it is not only moving, but a truly powerful statement about human history and progress.

30 July to 24 August.

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