Reviews Edinburgh Published 16 August 2012

Edinburgh

Summerhall ⋄ 16th and 20th August 2012

A reflection on home and city in the eaves.

Daniel B. Yates

One’s first impressions of R J Thomson are of a collision between Dr Who and Morrissey somewhere on a young writers’ programme.  Gangling and elegantly diffident, scruffy but with the poise of a man in command of his raffish tailoring, he takes us, sometimes awkwardly, through something like an emergent lecture, from the stairwell of the byzantine old vetinary school, through a lift, to a brief glimpse of his unconscious through a door marked “mind your head”.

This is a contemplation of home, a place which, he informs us with brief, prismatic personal anecdotes, the city of Edinburgh marks his first impressions.  Pausing in the corridor we are regaled of Gaston Bachelard’s thoughts about home as the primary structuring place of mind and role, and further, of our dreams.  Taken up to the eaves of the building, the first room we enter he calls the “domestic space” and although windowsless and odd it has some uncanny semblance of domesticity: a can of Sweetheart’s stout sits in an otherwise empty wine rack, a large fridge, books, a kitchen table with an oddly placed spot-light, a framed pen drawing of Edinburgh opposite a tiny letterbox mirror.  All this curiously counterposed to the vet school skeuomorphism, an industrial soap dispenser and large square sink once for the cleansing of scientific viscera. “Feel free to look around, this will inform your perception of the piece” we are told by Thomson in his angular tones, in one of his rare literal moments.

In this hipsterish detourned hideaway flat, we are invited to play a wordgame.  A large bowl is passed around and each slip read by a participant. Most were snippets of poetic thoughts. I was asked to draw a picture of home, led to an easel I attempted to render heat, the spark and warmth of my parents coal fire, but with cackhanded elan made something more like a charred spider.  This was overlaid by a young woman’s picture of Edinburgh, castle and new town going over my rug and cinder.  There was something charming about this process, in the provisional kitchen with the provisional group, with the strange articulate man with his concrete observational poetry, whose designs on us felt both urgent and kind: as if we were always going to satisfy the piece, which was structured in such a way as to be always on the edges of our experiences, non-patronising, a hand-rubbing, hopeful, conceptual marionette.

Ushered through to second of the tripartite journey, a place the of imagination, an artist’s garrett, where Thomson admits to being a failed artist, informing us of a performative piece of his being integrated into building designs in a summer architecture school.  Here we gather around something dubbed the Light Machine, an iron tub, which is declared a product of technology and magic – the good doctor thumping it with a dashing injunction, daring us to even believe it might work, when he knows, and we hope, that of course it will.  People lend it their stories, when asked “your first impression of home” a young woman volunteers a story of her granddad bringing home a shell, which was much admired by the family before it got up and scuttled off – it was a crab. “A real poetic resonance with what we’re talking about” declared the delighted professor, redolent of the careful speculative suspension between the ideas and the people present that runs throughout.

The third space is slightly nightmarish, a frozen image of something, a tableau of something earlier told. Home, we begin to surmise, is a place of contradiction, both repressive and unbounded in its horizon.  It is, Thomson declares in his vertiginous attic, a product of the abyss – as we are slightly awkwardly ushered out, in perfect keeping with the tone of the piece, he gently explains that Edinburgh is not an abyss, it is not bottomless, it is a place as Coleridge noted of great alternation of height and depth, but certainly not without foundation nor insurmountable, indeed, he assures us, there “nothing so much higher than an escarpment”.  Mise en abyme, a phrase Thomson repeats, the effect of infinite facing mirrors coined first by André  Gide concluding for us that home is a reflexive place and so are their extension, the cities we inhabit.  But home is also made swiftly and together, perhaps in the moments in which we forget we are not home. As we are ushered out to a collective ad hoc rendition of Yellow Submarine in the lift, where two attendants have been instructed to stop us at a midway floor to laugh as we carry on like lunatics, the sense of togetherness and exploration is complete. “In its loose quiet way, this is a revolutionary text” one of us reads out from a slip at the kitchen table: in its quiet but not quite so loose way, this slight and cleverly self-conscious piece which makes hot and cold our enduring  concern with the hearth, may well be just that.

Advertisement


Daniel B. Yates

Educated by the state, at LSE and Goldsmiths, Daniel co-founded Exeunt in late 2010. The Guardian has characterised his work as “breaking with critical tradition” while his writing on live culture &c has appeared in TimeOut London, i-D Magazine, Vice Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives and works in London E8, and is pleasant.

Edinburgh Show Info


Written by R J Thomson

Cast includes R J Thomson

Link http://www.summerhall.co.uk/

Running Time 1 hour

Advertisement


the
Exeunt
newsletter


Enter your email address below to get an occasional email with Exeunt updates and featured articles.


Advertisement