The huge gilt lettering on a glossy, sky-blue screen: this is POPULAR. The leather armchair that might have been lifted from under the bum of a dozing gent in the London Library. Many things put me off Mythos, Stephen Fry’s retelling of Greek myths. Nuggets… Stephen Fry in Mythos: A Trilogy at Edinburgh’s Festival theatre. Everything steers towards the conflicts of a doctor whose favoured expression is “crystal clear”. Hildegard Bechtler’s design – pale wood and metal in clean curves – looks clear-cut but is drizzled with shadow by Natasha Chivers’s subtle lighting. Above the stage Hannah Ledwidge sits drumming, sending out a pulse between scenes. The Doctor is more than a debate, as much personal as public. Alongside her, Ria Zmitrowicz magnetises as an adolescent swimming up from the depths of difficulty. Yet under interrogation her face – observed in closeup on a video screen – is seen at war with itself, eyes and mouth puckering in contradiction and pain. She quenches a subordinate with a flick of her eyes. Limbs neat and rigid, she moves like a soldier on parade. Stevenson brings all her perplexed intensity to the role.
I doubt whether many in the Almeida audience will be lining up behind characters other than the doctor. The production, which teases us into thinking we are seeing things from all angles, with the stage revolving minutely through the evening, is more tendentious than it first appears. This jolt to assumptions is needed – even when it means too much is going on. Much as they declare their profession by a uniform: characters are seen becoming a priest and doctor by putting on dog collar and white coat. “Turns out”, because in a brilliantly bewildering manoeuvre, Icke cross-casts black and white actors, women and men, so that we know what they “are” only when they tell us. His doctor is white and a woman and an atheist, the head of a medical institution where some feel the white and the female and the non-religious are privileged.
Icke makes the storm into a blizzard, in which selfhood is fractured, dispelled, unknowable.
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