Edinburgh Fringe 2024
The Suicide Club
Torro del Drago Company
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Adaptation, Physical Theatre, Theatre
Venue: Greenside
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Straight from Italy comes this wild adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Suicide Club, a mash-up of physical theatre, spoken word theatre and theatre of the absurd. Directed, adapted by and starring Luigi Facchino, alongside cast members Dominique Barra, Antonio Passard, Mario Bozzi and Eugenio di Ciaula.
Review
One of the great joys of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is finding theatre companies that stretch and mix the boundaries of well-known genres to deliver work that is both novel and unexpected. Such is the case with Italian theatre company Torro Del Drago and their adaptation of The Suicide Club, which has arrived in Scotland with a deconstructed, absurdist and interactive take on the Robert Louis Stevenson short story of the same name.
As befitting its title, The Suicide Club is rather macabre. Prince Florizel of Bohemia and Colonel Geraldine are visiting London when they meet an odd young man who is trying to give away cream tarts. Intrigued, the Prince and Colonel invite the cream-tart chap to dinner, where he tells them about the existence of a Suicide Club for men who want to end their lives. At each club gathering, two members (excluding the club’s president) are randomly chosen: one to be killed, the other to be the killer to make the death not look like a suicide. Wanting to see and experience the club in action, the Prince and Colonel claim to want to end their lives and are admitted to the club.
Director and adaptor Luigi Facchino has embraced not only the dark nature of the Stevenson tale but expanded its existential underpinnings. Upon entering, each audience member is given a playing card. The show then begins not with the introductions of the Prince and the Colonel but with an interpretive dance that explores the beginning of life, presenting man naked and unprotected before life shakes him down. The dance is followed by the arrival of the man with the cream tarts, who offers the tarts to the audience before gifting them to the the Prince and the Colonel.
The action then moves to the Suicide Club, where club members contemplate the meanings of their lives and their willingness to end them before various audience members are asked to publicly state what they value most in life. (“Experiences” was the first response given, the likely related “Sex” the last.) The club president then lines up the four members, and, to underline the randomness of existence, an audience member with a specific playing card is revealed to be the killer and then has to choose who among the four club members on stage is to be killed. Interestingly, at the performance I attended, the audience member with the designated killer playing card did her best to not reveal herself; she did not want the responsibility of choosing someone to die. Only when the president forced everyone in the audience to hold up their cards was the killer unearthed. And choose she did.
The Suicide Club doesn’t always make sense, and prior knowledge of the original Stevenson story would be most beneficial because little contextual background is provided. But to its great credit the show is never dull, and all five members of the bold cast are excitingly fearless. And this adaptation has more than fatalistic grotesquerie on its mind. In the show’s final moments, after a final narrative surprise, audience members are asked how much they value their lives. Given the state of the world, it’s a question well worth pondering.
