From Where I'm Standing

There are a fair number of shows in Edinburgh this year using technology to move beyond the confines of limited and temporary theatre spaces, but From Where I’m Standing really showcases the potential of audio and visual innovation as it moves between past, present and future.

We start with the 1997 general election, a new dawn and an enviably naïve teenage Blair fan about to leave school. Somewhere in the present a terrorist attack in Mumbai on the British embassy hospitalizes its main suspect, the former teenage love of the idealistic schoolgirl and father to a daughter navigating her own existential maze in 2028. The future is a place in which human interaction has become a lifestyle choice and social media has eaten itself.

The thematic link between all these time periods is an obsession with the nature of humanity, both in terms of its potential for good and a fatalistic idea of innate evil. We see a terrorist’s daughter obsessed by the idea that her baby might inherit her own father’s capacity for unspeakable cruelty. Then there is traveler in India unable to come to terms with the fact that the man who saved her life also killed a score of others, and the first rumblings of dissent in a Southampton schoolroom by a gifted but directionless boy looking for something against the backdrop of New Labour’s promised utopia.

This is a play that deserves a bigger stage and asks serious questions about the nature of compassion, humanity and the point at which we now find ourselves.