NORWEGIAN novelist Erlend Loe’s Doppler is the tale of an almost archetypal “man who has everything” who turns his back on a life of material opulence and, in an act of misanthropic disgust, takes to living in a tent in the forest. It is, with undeniable prescience, a story for our times of ecological destruction, viral plague and space-blasting billionaires.
Indeed, the novel’s relevance seems to increase with each passing month. Which is just as well for Grid Iron theatre company, who have been planning a site-specific dramatisation of the novel for some three years.
Ben Harrison, artistic director of the Leith-based company, first read Loe’s novel in 2018. A copy had been gifted to him by a theatre friend in Serbia, where a stage adaptation of the book had been a hit in Belgrade.
By early last year Harrison was writing his own dramatisation of the story for a Grid Iron production, which was due to be played in a forest during the 2020 Edinburgh Fringe. Then, of course, on March 23 of last year, the UK went into its first Covid lockdown.
Ever hopeful, Grid Iron persevered with a virus-safe series of rehearsals. Ultimately, however, ever-changing Covid protocols conspired with logistical concerns to scupper the August 2020 shows.
Aware, perhaps, that many theatre lovers were becoming fatigued with the stream of well-intentioned, but, almost by definition, second class online screenings of drama productions, Harrison’s company took a slightly different approach to the crisis. Rather than merely filming the show and putting it on the internet, they made an excellent documentary film, titled Doppler: The Story So Far, which was streamed via the Grid Iron website between late-March and early-May of this year.
The film was, as I wrote on its release, “a eulogy to live theatre and a prayer for its rapid return”.
THIS summer appears to be the beginning of that return. The Edinburgh International Festival has programmed many live, in-person productions, and the Fringe’s live offering seems to grow by the day.
This includes Doppler, which is, finally, being presented as part of next month’s Fringe programme, in the grounds of Newhailes House on the outskirts of Musselburgh. The play is being staged with the support of the new Fringe Artist and Venue Recovery Fund.
As was the case last year, the superb Keith Fleming plays the title role. The cast is completed by Sean Hay, Chloe-Ann Tylor (who replaces the unavailable Itxaso Moreno) and foley player Nik Paget-Tomlinson (who takes up the mantle of the production’s composer David Pollock).
The lead–in to the production has been so long, jokes Harrison, when I check-in with him during rehearsals, that “it’s felt a bit like working with a German company”. He’s referring to the famously well-resourced theatre productions of über-directors such as Peter Stein and Thomas Ostermeier.
Needless to say, however, Harrison would have preferred that the lengthy preparation period was the consequence of luxurious, German funding, rather than Covid-enforced cancellations.
The year-long delay has, if anything, made the play even more prescient, says the director. “It certainly doesn’t seem to have lost any of its relevance, in terms of thinking about the world in a different way,” he says.
“The central character questions capitalism and the very foundations on which our economy rests… It feels very much of the time. It poses very useful questions like, ‘when we come back from the pandemic, do we come back as we were, or do we come back with a different way of doing things?’”
Doppler plays at Newhailes House, Musselburgh, August 8-23: www.gridiron.org.uk
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