A weird theme of the start of this year’s Edinburgh festival season has been famous male actors fronting dance shows. There’s Ian McKellen, gamely mucking in – as a non-dancer – with a ballet version of ‘Hamlet’. And then there’s the International Festival’s ‘Burn’, a solo dance-theatre show about one Scottish icon – Robert Burns – performed by another – Alan Cumming
The piece is nominally inspired by recent academic analysis of the great poet’s works and life, which suggests Burns may well have been a depressive, going through sluggishly despairing spells and exuberant, hyper-prolific ones.
This essentially gives ‘Burn’ its structure, as it alternates between thunderous crescendoes –in which Andrzej Goulding’s enormous, elemental projections, Anna Meredith’s pummelling electro-tinged classical score and co-creator Steven Hoggart’s mime-ish movement are all pounding in concert – and moments of torpid, exhausted despair where everything collapses.
I’d say it amounts to a neat structural conceit rather than a thorough re-examination of the man. In fact ‘Burn’ is a relatively easy-going chronological romp through the poet’s life and times, using his own words. There’s at least as much time given to his womanising as his depression, with Cumming amusingly wooing a series of shoes that descend from the ceiling and stand in for the frankly enormous number of ladies in Burns’s life.
It’s not really a case of Cumming acting the role of Burns. Really, he’s performing the role of Alan Cumming: clad all in black and sporting lank gothy hair and eye makeup (ie not how Burns looked unless the portraits missed his emo phase), there’s a lot of fourth wall breaking and quippy asides. He acts as Burns’s stand-in, but you never really feel he’s trying to earnestly embody him.
This means that the fact Cumming is now 20 years older than Burns was when he died feels essentially irrelevant. I do wonder, though, if being younger would have allowed him to do more with the physical side of the show. I’ve seen some stunning choreography from Hoggart – who co-choreographs with Vicki Manderson – but here it’s pretty restrained, limited to fairly conservative rhythmic movements. I’m sure I’d pass out after trying to keep up with Cumming for more than five minutes, and he has an awful lot of talking to do as well. But as a dance show it’s pretty limited, which is a shame because it feels like the more sturm und drang moments could really do with something a bit more spectacular on the physical side.
Ultimately, ‘Burn’ is a breezily bombastic hop, skip and jump through the life of Scotland’s national poet, as presented by your twinkling-eyed host, Alan Cumming. In all honestly, I think it probably sets itself out as something a little loftier than that. But it’s a fond tribute that would doubtless have tickled Burns (in one of his good moods, anyway).