The Law of Gravity

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 13/2/2025

Manipulate Festival, ‘The Law of Gravity’, Scottish Ensemble, Blind Summit

 Edinburgh’s annual Manipulate Festival is a celebration of animation, puppetry and physical theatre that has been a highlight of  evenings in the last days of winter for the last 18 years, bringing international and home grown talent in these disciplines to brighten a dreich time of year.

As part of this year’s programme, two companies, Scottish Ensemble and Blind Summit,  who are renowned in their own respective fields of music and puppetry, have joined together to bring The Law of Gravity to Scottish audiences in a World Premiere. Each company has a reputation for breaking boundaries in their own area of expertise so the challenge of a collision of the visual and the aural was the ambitious goal with this production. To paraphrase the programme notes of Scottish Ensemble’s Music Director Jonathan Morton, the two disparate disciplines have in common the fact that both string instruments and puppets only come to life through human intervention.

Over the performance, two pieces of music were played -  Arnold Schoenberg’s  ‘Verklärte Nacht’ (Transfigured Night) and Symphony No.3  by Philip Glass. During the first performance, the  violin and viola players (Jonathan Morton; Tristan Gurney; Jane Atkins; Andrew Berridge) stood while the 2 cellists  (Naomi Pavri; Nathanial Boyd) played on moveable platforms. At front stage sat 4 lecterns where the puppeteers (Jasmine Chiu; Lori Hopkins; Mark Crawley; Rachel Fletcher-Hudson) sat. As the music is played, sheets of papers are held up with musical notes written on them. These graduate to words and images that are then held together like a kind of aerial jigsaw, all quite a feat of co-ordination.

After moving the cellists’ platforms, and when the other players have walked to the back of the stage, the puppeteers walk across the stage behind  big cardboard sheets. A cardboard shape, that could have been a fish or a spaceship, (of course it was the latter) is then manoeuvred in the air. The miming  of playing a cardboard instrument through holes in the large sheets held a  playful promise but came to nought. Only about 40 minutes in to the show did an actual puppet appear. And for a brief time, the consummate skills of Blind Summit  took centre stage. The delicate spaceman was manoeuvred by 3 puppeteers using Japanese Bunraku style to create beautiful balletic movements that were exquisite and strangely seductive, although a 4th puppeteer often blocked the view of the starman by holding up an electronic device, which was not helped by subdued lighting at this point.

The musical skills of Scottish Ensemble are beyond question, and their part in the show was accomplished, although the music played was of the intellect and not the heart to a classically  uneducated ear and may have appealed more to followers of Scottish Ensemble who reflected a demographic shift in the Manipulate audience.

However,  this esoteric concept did a disservice to the immense skills of Blind Summit who are no strangers to Edinburgh stages and have been known to have audiences roaring and eagerly leaning forward to drink in the unique experience of the subversive puppetry skills before their eyes. In The Law of Gravity their  role was, for the most part, disappointingly  reduced to being extraordinarily elegant stage hands.

Running time: 65 mins

Following this World Premiere at the Traverse Theatre The Law of Gravity had two further Scottish dates which were:

Dundee Rep  on Friday 14th February

Glasgow to the RSNO New Auditorium  on Saturday 15th February. 

A 30-minute Q&A followed the performance.