Review: War With The Newts
★★★★
KNAIVE Theatre established themselves as a young company to watch with last year’s Bin Laden: One Man Show, a piece in which the Al-Qaeda founder’s life story and speeches were retold by blue-eyed Englishman Sam Redway and set to stirring music from American westerns. Recontextualising the terrorist as a more familiar hero shifted audience perspectives, and revealed how layers of ideology, culture and bias often shape our ideas more than the actual words being spoken. Redway is back in this piece, an ambitious telling of Karel Capek’s 1936 sci-fi classic War With The Newts.
Adapted by Redway’s colleague Tyrrell Jones, and also featuring the excellent Everal A Walsh and Nadi Kemp-Sayfi, this is immersive, zany fringe theatre at its best. On arrival, each audience member is measured and stamped like livestock before being escorted to a place in the hull of a decommissioned oyster ship. Here we’re watched over by screen-bound avatars and a trio of fleshy automatons – a nod to Capek’s 1921 play Rossum’s Universal Robots, the work credited with bringing the word “robot” to the world. The newts we never see, though their influence is all around us, and the reason we’re currently holed up in this boat, watching glitchy, live-action footage from its eventful past.
As Margaret Atwood said of her Handmaid’s Tale – all science fiction is about the present, not the future or the past. Written as the Nazis consolidated power in neighbouring Austria and Germany, the Czech writer’s classic remains relevant and sharply satirical; and when it’s this entertaining and fun, you need to see why.
Until Aug 26 (not 20), Summerhall, Edinburgh, 5pm and 8pm (1hr), £12, £10 concs. Tel: 0131 560 1581. Tickets: bit.ly/NewtsSummerhall www.summerhall.co.uk www.knaivetheatre.com
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