Balam Acab is Alec Koone, from Pennsylvania, whose electronic compositions emerged a couple of years ago alongside the short-lived witch house movement; but it’s also the name of a bow-wielding Mayan rain god. It seems appropriate therefore that Wander / Wonder, Koone’s first full-length release (well, it’s over half an hour long) has a fluidity about it: it’s a slow-moving subterranean river of an album, which takes time to gather its full force.

The first half of Wander / Wonder is a frustrating listen: a series of ambient tracks are aborted just as they’re getting into gear, slow-building tributaries that lead nowhere. On ‘Welcome’ and ‘Motion’, crunching percussive loops and sampled water effects are awash with mounting synth lines, but the building pressure has no storm to relieve it, no catharsis and no consummation. ‘Welcome’ rises up into a euphoric synth line, but it’s just teased the ear before it fades quickly away. Most interesting are the vocals, choral or pitch-shifted but always uncanny, which orbit the aural field but refuse to be drawn into sense or centre. Bass synths and skittering drums pile up, and loop crashes against eerie loop; ‘Apart’ is like a Burial off-cut, but heavier and more unearthly.

It is with ‘Now Time’ that the album starts to grow in strength: after all the interesting but slightly soulless ambience of the first four tracks, this sounds almost like an actual song – albeit a remix by a talented madman. Doing clever business with simple elements, this is the first sign on Wander / Wonder that Balam Acab can do structure as well as texture. ‘Oh, Why’ is even better, another almost-song that stands out with a sound like CocoRosie recording for Hyperdub. It even has a verse/chorus thing going on, even if the only distinguishable lyrics are the title.

Thereafter it’s back to looser structures, but ‘Await’ makes more sense than the album’s opening tracks: it’s a fragmentary epilogue to its more conventional predecessors. The album closes with more sampled water, more shifting, uneasy drum loops and bass synths but this time there’s a climax. It all comes together, huge and mighty forms lurching, slowly, in time. Finally, in the last ten seconds of ‘Fragile Hope’, it starts to rain.

The main vexation of Wander / Wonder is the delay of the central, structured tracks, the way they’re prologued by too much ambient aimlessness, intriguing as it may be. The first twenty minutes here are interesting and often engaging, but only occasionally affecting. It’s a mystery why early EP tracks like the enticing ‘See Birds’ have been excluded; a single further example of Balam Acab’s gift for actual songcraft would make this several times the album that it is.

Perhaps, though, the problem isn’t Wander / Wonder itself, but with the mindset with which it’s approached. For the most part this is an album of half-light and half-lucidity, of slow-moving water deep underground: dreampop without the pop. By conscious, critical standards it’s worthy, and grows notably stronger in its second half; but it’s probably unfair for anyone to make a final judgement unless heavily sedated. Maybe the dead ends, shifting thresholds, and loops accumulating like sonic stalactites would all make sense in a semiconscious state. You may as well give it a go.

Bombarding the audience with an audiovisual assault of strings and flashing lights almost before they have sat down, Acorn Productions’ version of this darkly comic (or should that be comically dark?) dinner party begins with a stormy energy that sets the pace for an evening of sustained tension.

Despite having only one setting, sensitive direction from Anna Fox and Robert Nairn meant that there was enough movement to avoid a sense of stagnation, without creating the feeling that the cast were playing musical chairs, as the six guests and their waiter moved about the table during the course of the meal. Similarly, the widely divergent characters represented in what terrifyingly blunt hostess Paige (Charlotte Mulliner) calls her ‘interesting mix of guests’ could easily have ended up as camped up caricatures, but instead were played with a maturity and depth that belied the cast’s (sometimes difficult to ignore) youth.

I admit that I groaned inwardly when a ‘Working Class’ character, Mike (Alfred Enoch), was suddenly introduced to the fray, fearing that Moira Buffini, after providing a series of brilliantly awkward middle class mishaps, would spoil it all by providing a predictably down to earth foil to their affluent extravagance and host Lars’ (Will Hatcher) cringeworthy philosophical flights of fancy.

However, Enoch (whose astronomically inconsequential role in the Harry Potter films was inexplicably trumpeted as a major selling point in the marketing material), despite a somewhat dubious ‘generic common accent’, did a nice turn as the unwilling guest, delivering untempered comments and taunts with a studied impudence that contributed believably to the eventual boiling over of Hatcher’s super laid-back philosopher/guru Lars.

Another notable performance was that of Alice Pearse, who played artist, vegetarian and all-round hippy character Wynne with a beautiful mix of gormlessness, wounded innocence and a pinch of old fashioned British fairplay spirit thrown in for good measure. She evidently had a lot of fun with brilliant lines such as ‘Actually my parents were working class, I’m only middle class through education’ and in describing a certain four letter word as a ‘beautiful orchid’, but again, aided by Buffini’s writing, remained a believable person with real emotion rather than a cartoon character of a new-age victim.

Finally, Rhys Bevan provided the most believable performance as a forty-something as microbiologist Hal. Something about his slightly stiff movements, his grumpiness, his insecure leching (not to mention his beard) created the sense of a man in the midst of a midlife crisis. Bevan was also notable for his comic timing, something that was sometimes lacking in Mulliner’s valium monotone delivery and Hatcher’s langourous drawl.

If I had any complaints, they would relate more to the set and props than to acting and direction. Whilst the plain black of the table, chairs and background might be thought to emphasize the nihilism of Lars’ vacuous philosophy and the lives of his and Paige’s guests, the fact that parts of the plastic chairs showed through as the cast dislodged black cloths, the cheap plastic lobsters and the unconvincing violence (another show by the same company, Mojo, had spectacular stage effects and dressing) made me feel that these aspects had been overlooked.

That said, the performances were almost universally excellent, and I was pleasantly surprised that what at first seemed an example of a tired genre of writing managed to surprise and affect me, despite seeming to pile cliché after cliché in character, plot and thought. How many times has the need to live and seek goals been contrasted with the essential pointlessness of existence? Answers on a self addressed postcard please.

The balance between surrealism, observationally comic dialogue, impassioned speechmaking and dramatic tension was at times strange, which might lead a less sympathetic reviewer to dub it as a bit of a hatchet job. However, the sometimes incongruous mix of deep philosophical wrangling and petty details of characters’ sexual indiscretions struck me as entirely appropriate if neither was taken too much at face value, and Acorn Productions’ canny handling of a potentially risky play certainly left me wanting seconds.

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Even as the Edinburgh Fringe Festival begins, three weeks feels too short a time to see everything on offer. But, with some careful planning and diligent research, you can make sure you see only the highest quality productions. As the Festival draws to a close, jump on the East Coast Line and give yourself a heady dose of wall-to-wall theatre! 

After the End
Pleasance Courtyard, 1.50

A subtle two-hander by Dennis Kelly set in an underground shelter after a nuclear attack. Mark has rescued Louise from the blast while their friends and colleagues were left to burn. Trapped in the shelter, their imprisonment becomes a fight for survival as they struggle to find common ground. 

The venue was suitably small with performers just a few feet away from the front row. A couple of lockers, a dim single bulb, two chairs and a radio were enough to create a terrifying picture of enclosure. Conversations turn from food supplies to Dungeons and Dragons. Kelly’s dialogue might seem mundane to some viewers. Yet his work is incredibly difficult to pull off without making the piece feel overly stilted. The performances by the Dundee Rep Theatre Company betray the power-play behind the smallest sentences where no word is ‘innocent’. Veering from Mark’s fascist sympathies to his long-suffering jealousy of Louise’s old crushes at their workplace, now in ashes in the wreck of the world above, their dialogue quickly reveals Mark’s more sinister intentions. The show sustained a tension beneath which, an audience constantly suspected, lurked the prospect of a violent disaster.

As a thriller, After the End will entertain and grip audiences, but the play linger long after. Kelly is an excellent observer of the small evils of the everyday. We are, in pedantic detail, shown the horrific ways in which humans violate one another. 

Hedda Gabler 
2.30, Hill Street Theatre

Hedda Gabler is forced to suffer quietly under the yoke of a drab marriage to her bookish husband. Like Hedda, the audience is taken in by the affable, bumbling George Tessman. They are quickly reminded that obsession is not necessarily a booming fanaticism; it can be a dull, tepid way of life. Tessman is played with an awkward and absent cruelty. Hedda is driven by the desire to escape the stagnancy of the couple’s tangled milieu of ex-lovers and professional rivals. She meditates on her ability to act, to finally do something of significance. Lashing out, her energy becomes dedicated to dismantling careers and tearing romances apart. 

The Palindrome Theatre Company’s production is a refreshing adaptation of a play that is often hamstrung by Victorian, out-moded performances. Rather than merely offering a few tweaks for the sake of novelty, everything from a firmly post-war costume, to a borrowing of idioms from middle-America, reveals the dedication of the production to transform the classic. The script is incredibly fluid. Indeed, its easy to forget that this is a translation of a spiritually serious Norwegian play when the show feels more like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or a campus novel by Philip Roth. The stage was clammy and claustrophobic; the six performers never leave the studio and give the audience an intimate impression of Hedda’s oppressive social network. Live percussion, thunderclaps, gun shots and strobe lighting allowed the company to substitute raw tension in place of musty realism.

Futureproof
17. 45, Traverse Theatre

Futureproof is the story of a closely knit, but eclectic, troop of circus oddities. After violent confrontations with disgruntled ‘townies’ the performers realise that the old freak-show bill cannot pull in crowds as it once did. Riley, their ringleader, is driven to try something bold. Transformation may be difficult but the freaks are forced to adapt to modern tastes, to embrace the norm, with unforeseen, even bloody, consequences.

Nominated for a Fringe First Award for design, Futureproof lives up to its reputation for visual panache. Riley’s Odditorium, a traveling freak-show, is rendered in gritty detail to create a musty backstage clutter from the era of vaudeville and silent film. An automatic piano provides an out of tune entre-act music. When the visual and the performative come together, the result is incredibly stylish. A moving dream sequence during the final moments of the show takes place in the mind of George/ Georgina – made-up half as a stunning brunette and half as a well groomed young man in dungarees (complete with prominent trouser bulge) – and borrows from the aesthetic of a glitzy magic-show. Sign language conversations between the mute Serena and one of the conjoined twins were accompanied by Chaplin-esque subtitles. The dialogue was a little clunky and too many performers up on stage at once, and the jumpy scene changes could seem like an exercise in turn-taking. In fact, we shared the frustration of the punters who paid a little extra to see George/Georgina in the nude: it would have been more thrilling to spend a little more time with each one of the characters. The fable might have been a little old-hat and the show far from perfect but you couldn’t help but gawp. While Futureproof relies on its visual centre-pieces, it is impressive enough not to leave you dissatisfied. 

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle
7.30, The King’s Theatre

The jewel in the crown of the Edinburgh International Festival, The Wind up Bird Chronicle is an adaptation of a novel by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami. Stephen Earnheart’s production, seven years in the making, employs puppets, projection, multiple television screens and a wonderful score performed live by Bora Yoon. A noir-inspired hunt for a lost cat, everyman Toru Okada is visited in turn by a series of femme fatales, school girls and nightmarish concierges. In dreams and stories, Toru is transported from 1940s Manchuria, raree shows and a creepy Lynchian hotel. Noboru Wataya, Toru’s sinister brother-in-law,  lurks in the darkness as jerky puppets pour each other glasses of cutty-sark.  No matter how mad the dreams the set shifts and return to base; the terrifying ‘dream police’ depart and the audience find themselves back at Okada’s anonymous apartment.

The production captures the spirit of Murakami’s phantasmagorical union of East and West. A superb international cast perform harmoniously while cultures, old and new, east and west, rub up against one another. Japanese subtitles are flashed on screen for conversations between everyman Toru Okada and his absent wife Kumiko. The English script was also excellent, based on Jay Rubin’s translations: reading Murakami is always infused by a dry, hard-boiled wit that wasn’t dropped. James Saito was a truly nasty piece of work as Toru’s megalomanic brother-in-law.

At the end of the production, when the lights come up, a collage of tape and chalk crosses on the boards gives some clue as to the technical mastery of the piece. The greatest thrill is how well-wrought this multimedia adaptation is. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle never once lets up in its relentless series of visual marvels. 
 

Titus Andronicus
22.15, C Venues (+1)

Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy is given a darkly comic and gothic makeover in this energetic late-night production. Titus Andronicus, a well respected general of Rome, is made the plaything of the Empress Tamora, his onetime prisoner. A cycle of revenge is played out mercilessly and the pace is unremitting. Limbs are removed every ten minutes and tossed about irreverently. Hands are struck off. For the grande finale, Titus chains the children of his enemy to a table, drills a hole in their chests and serves them up in a pie to their own mother.

Brutal and graphically ‘in-yer-face’ there is little subtlety to any of the strong, loud deliveries. Cleavage burst from the tight PVC corsets of Tamora’s vampiric goths. Titus himself looked like a rugby captain. Chiron and Dimitrius, Tamora’s lusty sons, were played as lanky, hulking orks. Sweaty clubbing scenes featured music from Faithless and ‘dramatic music’ (the kind that fills the ad breaks on Sky Sports 1) was pumped out during fight scenes. The production was wildly entertaining. The intimacy of the venue, with the audience on three sides, guaranteed front row seats for rape and murder. Some lucky audience members found themselves fodder for blood sputters and half-chewed cannibal pie. Confrontations were equally immediate and satisfyingly macho. At one point, the machiavellian Aaron leaps into the air, muscles rippling, punching Chiron in the face and kicking Demitrius in the guts. The performers capture the violence of fallen Rome and promise audiences a hedonistic eyeful.