Divine Invention
Ed Fringe 24
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Ed Fringe 24 -
Divine Invention is the newest offering from Sergio Blanco, the acclaimed Franco-Uruguayan playwright. It is performed by his long time translator and collaborator Daniel Goldman and is, I am led to believe, quite a departure stylistically from his other works.
Goldman is sitting at a desk, a desk with a hefty pile of paper on it, a microscope, a Francis Bacon painting, books (Plato’s, amongst other tomes), and a human rib bone. The show is an auto-fictional lecture, a lecture on love. When I was at University my lecturer told me there wasn’t any philosophy worth reading on the subject (other than Bauman’s Liquid Love), it is a subject impossible to capture in words and harder still to contribute anything new to - over to you then Blanco.
Goldman tells us up front about the format: there’s a prologue, thirty short chapters, and an epilogue. They will be read out, one after the other, with minimal ‘acting’. There will be Erik Satie near the end and the Rolling Stones in the middle and as Goldman begins, reading one page, then another, turning them ritualistically into a new pile, it would be easy to think you’re in for a long one.
The text is densely referenced, Paul Elouard, Plato, Madame Bovary, it charts the creation of the text that is being read aloud. It moves from personal reflections on the ability to write about love, to accounts of scientific attempts to define the brain's response to falling in love, it touches on Francis Bacon’s love for the boxer George Dyer and then brings this round to relate to Blanco’s own troubling experience of loving a boxer. It grapples with abusive love, with love outside most, if not all, of our ethical limits, of familial love, of love in literature, in music, in philosophy. It was at about chapter 15 that I noticed I was completely rapt.
This is a deeply, deeply moving lecture, it takes itself entirely seriously and therefore has the generosity to treat its audience as adults capable of complex reflections. The show feels like the antithesis, or maybe the antidote, to a culture obsessed with ‘content’, content that must be brief, quick, created to last ten seconds, to give a hit of dopamine then be instantly forgotten. This show is the opposite, if you engage with it (and I appreciate that the form will alienate some), then you will be encouraged to think deeply about what you think love is, what it means to you, what it means historically, evolutionarily, ethically.
There are many chapters that stick with you, one recounts anthropologist Margaret Mead’s argument that the first sign of civilisation was an ancient healed femur as it signalled our species capability to nurse someone back to health, rather than leave them to die in the wild.
It is lovely to hear the Shakespeare verses that close the show, perhaps the greatest ever chronicler of love, and whilst there might not be anything new left to say on the subject, by standing upon the shoulders of giants, Blanco has managed to reflect a captivating view.
Divine Invention was on at Summerhall as part of Edinburgh Fringe 2024, its run has now finished.
FOUR STARS
