River's Edge

Wonderful stuff from Lesley Hill and Helen Paris, taking a group of Stratford-Upon-Avon locals' stories of their relationship with their locality, and weaving a hallucinatory Tourist River Trip around them.

On board the boat, our tour guide quickly began to unravel in terms of her relationship to our locality, seeming to see Venice and the Nile where the Avon Rowing Club and a slightly foxed riverside restaurant stood. People on the riverbank began to further tear open the fabric of the screen between the audience, the stories and the 'real world' we had quite definitely left behind.

Curious' productions always seem very graceful in achieving these quite shocking shifts away from the comforts of the quotidian world, and the comforts of the audience seat; we are spirited to a disturbing Elsewhere but always in very good humour and fine style.

The production achieved the unlikely feat of transforming a sleepy stretch of the Avon into a re-enactment of Odysseus' life-and-death sail between Scylla and Charybdis, and of the always-arresting moment when characters appear of whose 'reality' we are genuinely unsure.

Excellent cocktail-pouring technique too, which we don't see nearly often enough, especially on a river boat that's about to run aground.