FringeReview Scotland 2025
We Will Hear The Angels
Magnetic North
Genre: Drama, Musical Stories
Venue: The Fruitmarket
Festival: FringeReview Scotland
Low Down
Magnetic North takes as the starting point for We Will Hear The Angels Sing the connection between melancholy and music. Its ensemble of actor-musicians conjure up a performance of theatre, music and song that is achingly sad but ultimately redemptive.
We Will Hear The Angels is part of Magnetic North’s 25th anniversary season.
25.01.25 – 06.02.25 7pm
Excluding Sundays and Mondays
Review
Why do we listen to sad songs when our world is falling apart?
It seems counterintuitive to take refuge in sad music when we’re in emotional pain, and yet it seems to be a universal human instinct. It’s this impulse that Magnetic North take as the starting point for their latest production, We Will Hear the Angels.
In the vast airy industrial warehouse space in the Fruitmarket Gallery, the central area is set up with music stands and chairs as if ready for a musical ensemble to perform. As the lights go down, the performers walk on and move the musical set up aside. From here we are cast adrift with characters purposefully crisscrossing the stage, neither connecting with nor acknowledging each other, each singularly alone even while part of the larger group. As they take their seats at desks set out in a circle, fragments of individual lives fractured by heartbreak begin to emerge.
Individual vignettes – a woman packing a suitcase, a man waltzing with a vase of flowers, another with an egg on his desk – all serve as tableaux that imprint the scenes on our memory. Gradually each tells their story, stories of love and betrayal, stories of unrequited love and longing. Each alone and cut off from the outside world cocooned in their own individual misery.
Marie-Gabrielle Khoumenda stands back from the storytelling beating out the rhythm with sandsound maracas and timing the heartbreak with an egg timer, playing the part of MC with a hint of mystical healer, as each performer in turn takes a deep dive into their melancholy as if into some purgative and restorative ritual bath. Nicholas Bone wailing out Hank William’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Die’ leaves the space with an aching void which is filled by Caitlin Forbes’ heartfelt interpretation of Patsy Cline’s ‘Why Can’t He Be You?’. Greg Sinclair’s hauntingly wistful rendition of Orange Juice’s Rip it Up lingers in the air like longing while Apphia Campbell’s gut wrenching version of Etta James’ ‘I Would Rather Go Blind’ is a powerful cry of despair and defiance.
The music serves to amplify and articulate their heartbreak and lack of connection while simultaneously renewing a sense of connection. Carrying the music stands and chairs back to the centre, they start to play again, initially Bach before moving into the rising hope and harmonies of ‘Spinning Away’ by John Cale and Brian Eno, taking shy tentative looks at each other as they find a sense of acceptance of life and a renewed will to go on.
Inspired by Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (the title is taken from the last act), a Katherine Mansfield story and Hitchcock’s Rear Window, We Will Hear the Angels Sing, reflects on melancholy using movement, video, speech and music. Magnetic North’s performers are multi-talented combining these elements and providing a musical soundscape on guitar, (Bone), cello (Sinclair) and violin (Forbes) to create a production that is ethereally beautiful and powerful.
Nicholas Bone and Marisa Zanotti’s direction together with Daniel Padden’s musical direction pull a seemingly slight conceptual premise into a coherent piece which communicates the power of melancholy and the redemptive nature of sad music. Design by Emily James and lighting by Nigel Edwards make full use of the space and give full expression to the production.
Just as Katherine Mansfield’s beautifully crafted short stories use the patterns of music to achieve their effect, Magnetic North employs a pleasing circularity of form to play out its themes of fracture and alienation, healing and redemption.
Just as Katherine Mansfield’s beautifully crafted short stories use the patterns of music to achieve their effect, Magnetic North employs a pleasing circularity of form to play out its themes of fracture and alienation, healing and revival.
