The Very Best of the Edinburgh Festivals 2024
Review: Assembly Hall
Review: Orchestra of Sound
Review: After the Silence
Published 08 Aug 2016
Kurt Cobain was a bit of a paradox: desperately ambitious, but then hugely resentful of the fame that came his way. Belgian experimental theatre company Dood Paard seem to think this makes him a kind of grunge-era Macbeth. But their spliced Shakespeare/Nirvana story makes about as much sense as the plinky plonky spinet cover of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' that intermittently soundtracks it.
Gillis Biesheuvel and Manja Topper start with a chaotic recreation of an interview with Kurt and Courtney. She squeals, giggles and snorts her way through a grotesque parody of Courtney Love that ignores her feminist, riot grrrl energy in favour of nasal flirtation. He mangles quotes which show Kurt Cobain at his elliptical, posturing worst. The pair's thick accents and heightened performances make it a struggle to follow what's being said. But when they move on to a hyperactive puppet show of Macbeth, they're downright incomprehensible.
The final section mashes together Cobain, Love, and Macbeth into a sinister jumble: part three of this unholy trinity. As Biesheuvel and Topper exchange howls of loneliness, a Perspex sheet covered in cutlery starts to descend on them, all too slowly.
The production's raucous, haunted toy shop aesthetic feels bizarrely at odds with Cobain's notoriously downbeat public appearances. And it doesn't find the sinister intensity at the heart of Macbeth, either. It's a hugely textually complex piece, but it feels bizarrely mindless: like toddlers trying so hard to smash two incompatible bricks of Duplo together that they break them both.