Paradise in Augustines
Aug 24-30
(14:50)
The Boline Inn’s spooky sisterhood are now in Edinburgh as the Fringe debut of Meadow Report, an all-female Liverpool company. At its centre is Jane, whose search for her missing uncle leads her to the mysterious Boline Inn & the strange collection of women who inhabit it. Welcome to pitch-perfect 70s horror, ladies & gentlemen, brought to the stage fifty years later. Depsite being descrob’d as a ‘safe place for women’, there’s an immediate sense that something isn’t quite right inside this particular establishment, & the production has plenty of fun letting us wonder exactly what lurks behind its doors.
A walkman-sporting Jane arrives at the Inn with suitcase in hand, having found herself stranded somewhere in the vicinity of Skelmersdale after her car gives up the ghost. She is greeted by Betty, the Inn’s manageress, a woman whose welcome is considerably less hospitable than the word might suggest. “Hello traveller, it seems your path has led you astray to the Boline Inn,” she declares, & from there the production begins to slide deliciously towards the unhinged. Betty is eloquently & aggressively played by Gabriella Leonardi, an actress & fellow poet whose work I have encountered before with some admiration.
The hard-faced bitch Betty is merely one member of this strange female collective, however: a gang of women who begin to resemble a sapphic cult, each eccentric in her own particular fashion. There’s something faintly A Clockwork Orange about the whole affair – stylised, theatrical & just a little bit feral. The ensemble, comprising Mia Kelly, strong-soul’d leader Evelyn Peacock keeping the hotel ‘rooted’, Gabriella, Chloe Stokes, Eilis Mulholland & Grace Mia Haney, moves between accents & characters with a deliberate theatricality, while even seemingly throwaway details – such as the two Scottish women’s apparent obsession with Madonna – contribute to the peculiar mythology of the Inn.
Eilis Mulholland is also the director, & she serves us a feverish play which rarely settles, instead remaining constantly rattled by an undercurrent of disquiet. Throughout, the speakers release the bewitching, whispery sounds of a crackling fire, a ticking grandfather clock & the creaks of a rickety house. It render’d a curious, claustrophobic effect upon the auditorium – not oppressive, but sense-enhancing, drawing the ear deeper into the world of the Inn. It was very good indeed. These effects, combined with the performance space itself, make the Inn feel less like a building than a vivid dream – or perhaps a nightmare from which one cannot quite wake.
“How many journeys around the sun will you be an intermeddler in these parts, jane?”
As graphic novella that is The Boline Inn bounces between drama & musical theatre. The show is constantly moving, running at a fair old pace, but for me that also detracted from the suppos’d slow-rising of the tension – those delicious little moments when the hackles on the back of one’s neck should begin standing steadily to attention. It’s difficult to build inner tension when one’s appreciative pistons are firing at different speeds, & one cannot settle into a state of confluidity & simply surrender oneself to the performers.
There is, however, one particularly strange & lengthy detour which left me somewhat perturb’d. The two Scottish lassies find themselves communing with their ancestral spirits, in a sequence which is very well done & well acted – but, for the life of me, I could not quite work out why it was there. Had it been inserted especially for the Fringe? Was there some deeper meaning I had simply failed to divine? Probably. Yet within the 70-minute narrative, the scene felt curiously superfluous, something of a theatrical curve-ball which sent the proceedings spinning off in a direction I could not entirely follow.
This would not ordinarily trouble me – theatre can, & perhaps should, confound – but having been thoroughly engaged by what came before, I found it surprisingly difficult to re-engage once the scene had passed. Its purpose may well become clearer with repeated viewings, or perhaps I simply missed the key which would have unlocked it. As it stands, though, it felt less like an organic part of the Inn’s increasingly feverish mythology & more like an intriguing fragment from another story, briefly lodged inside this one.
Great credit must go to the choreography, scenes of excellent symbiosis serv’d as a fine tonic to the drama. The music was also pleasant, with Evelyn Peacock sometimes accompanying on an acoustic guitar. She play’d guitar gracefully, in open tuning, & at the end of the first song gently slid the capo to F, ready for the next step into Euterpe’s meadows.
All in all, The Boline Inn & it’s strangely believable bunch of women felt a tad too Twilight for me – tho’ it was this sense of realism from the girls that help’d tip the overall score to a 4 – great performers & a great spectacle make a decent show at least. As an actual teenage horror film, I reckon it would do rather well, but the problem with familiar territory is that it’s all too predictable. As a spectacle, tho’, it was great, sublime even in places. The aforemention’d sounds of fire & a rickety old house scratch away at the subconscious ears, while throughout proceedings a slightly acidic, charcoal-like smell assails thy nasal sense. Sight, sound & smell are all employ’d to pull us inside the Inn, & even when the drama didn’t entirely possess me, its strange supernatural atmosphere most certainly did.
Debuts are debuts, & there’s a touch of Endymion to it. of his first major poem, Keats said; ‘I leaped headlong into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice.’ I think the same applies with the Boline Inn, & I look forward to Meadow report’s Major Odes.
Damo
