Please NOTE this performance contains: HAZE, GUNSHOTS & LOUD NOISES, FLASHING LIGHTS, FOOD THAT YOU MIGHT BE ALLERGIC TOO, AUDIENCE MOVEMENT, SHEEP.
Well, with a welcoming notice like that, you can’t help but be excited! What will happen? What will happen to us? As it turns out, we are the sheep.
Right from the start the start, and all through the extraordinary, exhilarating, heartbreaking 90 minutes that follow, there is a dichotomy set up – a tussle between life and death. Glorious exuberant live music and the silence following a death. Wedding waltzes and the sound of a barrage of bullets battering the barricades. TV and YouTube footage of rioting crowds projected above the heads of audience members who sit at long dining tables laid with white linen cloths. There is drink; there is Ukranian food (on the menu tonight: a rather nice beetroot salad, and then dumplings with mushroom sauce); there is the opportunity to have a riot – a riot of your own.
As the 15-strong team of ‘guerrilla-folk party-punks’ from Kiev pull audience members up to dance a jolly mazurka or polka, chaos breaks out. Tables are trashed, tyres piled up into heaps. Facing us is a row of cops with riot shields. We have bricks. On your marks, get set, throw…
The exuberant spirit of resistance is infectious. Onstage, onscreen, all around us we are bearing witness to the true-life stories of the performers and their friends – the protesters marching and demonstrating daily against the Ukranian president’s corruption and the Russian interference in their country – and we enjoy casting ourselves in the romantic role of fellow freedom fighters. Hard-hats on, hand-painted banners waved, a communication tower climbed and adorned with the blue and yellow flags of Ukraine. Meanwhile, the sheep-masked musicians playing a fabulous mix of folk / street / gypsy jazz on a variety of instruments – trombones, tubas, drums – and there is beautiful polyphonic choral singing. Bring it on, we’re with you.
Then it turns nasty – a protestor is killed. We see the TV footage of the real-life funeral projected onto the three enormous screens above, and live, weaving through us, we see the cortege of performers carrying a draped body through the space. The cortege halts. The mournful, soulful singing stops and there is total, absolute silence, other than the sound of a woman sobbing quietly. Without spoiling the surprise for anyone who goes to see the show, there is, breaking this silence, a genius moment of theatre…
On the screens above, we see the statistics reeled out. The hundreds of protestors who are killed, with official numbers far lower than unofficial estimates, yet still – even officially – in their hundreds. The statistic that cuts me to pieces is the average age of the dead. 24. The age of my youngest son. The terrible reality of events in Kiev in 2014 (and continuing – the war is not over) is hammered home. But this skilful theatre company does not send us home desolate and with open wounds; there is a rounding-off, a closure, a coming together in peace and harmony.
At every Edinburgh Fringe there is one show that you unequivocally tell anyone who asks that this is the show to see –this year, Counting Sheep is that show for me. A wonderful piece of immersive, interactive, politically engaged, and inspirational ‘total theatre’.