Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Providence
Flora Novak
Genre: Physical Theatre, Puppetry, Solo Performance
Venue: C venues | C alto
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Artist Flora Novak brings to life with almost witchcraft intensity simple objects, creating a story that takes the audience deep into our archetypal unconscious at the very source of Western Civilisation.
Review
There is something almost supernatural in Flora Novak as this Hungarian artist starts her performance by staging the oldest of the myths: the forbidden apple of the Garden of Genesis. The intensity of her gaze is almost unsettling and the dark stories of Eastern European folklore tales seem to become real as she literally breathes life into simple unanimated objects.
We are thrown into the very Jungian archetype which is at the core of Western Civilisation. The evil-good / God-Lucifer duality is brought to the stage with an intelligent use of masks. The masks themselves are very well crafted and the light design of the whole show is impeccable, used in such a way as to engrave perfect visual sculptures that focus on the protagonist of the story: a simple puppet made of jute.
However, if God is often described as a man (the holy father, our father in heaven), here God is Flora Novak herself. She gives a female perspective on the adventure of mankind, crossing, probably without the artist being aware of it, with the tales of the Eastern World. The iconography reproduced on the stage is still that of Western Civilisation as from the Garden of Eden we move to ancient Egypt and finally to Revolutionary France. As we move from one scene to the other, the thread running through the whole piece seems to be mankind’s estrangement from God, in an eternal search to find that unity long lost once the forbidden apple was bitten.
Thus, the human experience of nudity, survival, violence but also redeeming love is explored in a purely emotional voyage eased by an original music score created exclusively for this piece of art. Love is described in its different facets: the Agape love of motherly and Godly love but also the carnal and erotic attraction of man-woman duality in the push and pull relationship of the two sexes, condemned to mortal exile from the light of divinity.
Even the experience of war is given a moment of importance as objects fight with one another to reach the apex at the top of the object-social pyramid.
It is almost mysterious how we are led to identify with the jute puppet that in quintessence represents all of us. We laugh with him, we emote and we are almost led to tears as we understand that our individual voyage has a deeper meaning which is simply invisible to us.
In a materialistic world, Flora Novak uses materials themselves to show us a spiritual light, a ray of hope.
A great performance and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to appreciate a new form of theatre.
