Tales of Magical Reaism[author-post-rating] (3/5)

There are only really four long lasting visual images in Sven Werner’s Tales of Magical Realism, all with kinetic parts: a train compartment with trees rushing past the window; a railway track surrounded by spots of light; a car hurtling down a highway; a huge hall with changeable lighting. We watch all these in miniature, peeping through spy holes whilst a narrator tells us the story. It’s a novel idea, but the piece moves altogether too slowly to have any impact and can at times seem tedious.

After waiting a short while in a small room, the audience of nine gets taken individually to separate rooms where we are given headphones and an iPod Shuffle, which gets clipped onto our clothes. A voice then tells us to listen to sounds of machinery and eerie, foreboding music (Graeme Miller) before she tells us to move to the next area.

There, a machine which looks like a cross between an early movie camera and some kind of intergalactic Victorian droid awaits us. By placing our eye to the viewfinder, we see the image being described through the headphones. The following two images are similar, with neither offering any movement beyond a repetitive motion. They startle at first, but it’s easy to find your mind wandering.

It is a tale of personal experience and how our senses make narratives, but I often found myself getting overwhelmingly frustrated. I didn’t want to follow the instructions spoken to me – why should I? – and longed to explore each room and the machines. The narrative itself seems to bear little resemblance to the surrounding environment, meaning it’s difficult to understand exactly under what pretext we are here.

Werner achieves a real coup during the final scene, when we find ourselves peddling to produce light for the scene in front of us. This is labour as theatre (and vice versa), where we become one of the hoard of people in the scene in the box in front of us. But like the rest of Tales of Magical Realism, it’s not much more than a good idea. There are plenty of interesting and arresting images in this piece, but there’s a lack of weight which makes the whole thing feel not much more than a passing folly.

Tales of Magical Realism is at Summerhall until 25 August. For more information and tickets visit the Edinburgh Fringe website.