UFO Info Week-End

Dozens of punters took more affirmative action by simply walking out – possibly propelled into the street by the

Dozens of punters took more affirmative action by simply walking out – possibly propelled into the street by the “cabin pressure” of inflated theatrical hot air.Mercifully, at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Mil quinientos metros sobre el nivel de Jack [1,500 Metres Above the Level of Jack] is a better import. Written and directed by young Argentinean Federico León (and performed in Spanish with English supertitles), this is a crazily hallucinatory, yet also brutally gritty, chamber play.It’s set in a dilapidated bathroom, complete with dripping taps and dirty grouting. And the action starts with a splash, for our antihero is a deep-sea diver who’s “gone down” – possibly dying far below sea level, or perhaps sinking spiritually into despair.Either way, we find him topsy-turvily surfacing in his mother’s bath. He lies there, like a gigantic black slug in his wet suit and she’s sprawled on top, scrawny and weeping in a sagging swimming costume. Soon they’re joined by a ragged young woman and a disturbed boy. All four are, at one point, gloomily jammed in the overflowing bath. This is a simultaneously ludicrous and bleak, almost Dantesque vision of domestic purgatory.What’s also engrossing is the slipperiness of León’s vision.

Parents and children identities are muddied amidst implications of sexual abuse. Maybe the diver is a ghost that his mother can’t wash away, or vice-versa. Meanwhile the youths are, on on level, authentic bolshy adolescents, lolling in the bath like it’s your everyday family sofa.Aesthetically, the downside is León’s aquatic drama starts to drift and the illogical dialogue – initially entertaining – becomes estrangingly obscure. Oh, and there’s no sense of an ending either.* ‘The Antipodes’: Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1 (020 7401 9919), to 22 September; ‘Mil quinientos…’: Edinburgh Festival Theatre (0131 473 2000), tonight. Two weeks before Jason Hughes – best known for his role as Warren in This Life – was due to open in Charlotte Jones’ award-winning play In Flame, he experienced a crisis of such proportions that it almost made him pull out. Not only had his mother suffered a near-fatal accident when one of her horses kicked her in the face – “equivalent to a gun-shot wound,” he says – but, quite eerily, the real-life situation he found himself in mirrored that of the play.

Two weeks before Jason Hughes – best known for his role as Warren in This Life – was due to open in Charlotte Jones’ award-winning play In Flame, he experienced a crisis of such proportions that it almost made him pull out. Not only had his mother suffered a near-fatal accident when one of her horses kicked her in the face – “equivalent to a gun-shot wound,” he says – but, quite eerily, the real-life situation he found himself in mirrored that of the play.
In In Flame – which opens at the New Ambassadors Theatre on Wednesday, with Kerry Fox and Marcia Warren – Hughes plays two roles: Arthur, an accident-prone apprentice butcher living in Edwardian Yorkshire, and a contemporary character, James, an unbalanced nurse whose job it is to look after an old woman in a home.”Both characters are struggling and searching to make sense of their lives,” he says. “Psychologically, both of them reach a metaphorical wall that has to be broken down in order for them to move on. Like them, I was at a point where I had to make a difficult decision. After the accident, I went back home to south Wales, where, like James, I found myself in a situation where I was a carer looking after an older woman. It was extraordinary that my own life was paralleling the play.”On 12 August, his mother, a horse breeder, was tending to a cut on one of her horses’ legs.

She picked up her medicine box but as she turned to look at the animal, it lashed out to kick another horse and she caught the full force of the blow. “If the horse had been shod there’s no doubt that she would have died,” he says. “As it was, all the bones in her face were shattered, she was rushed into intensive care, had a tracheotomy and major facial surgery. I was told she was lucky to be alive.”When Hughes heard the news, his instinct was to quit the cast. He rushed home and spent a few days agonising over his decision. Back in south Wales, the words of the play came to haunt his thoughts.

Just as the stage of In Flame is inhabited by characters of the past and the present, so Hughes’ mind was split between the parallels between art and life.”The characters in In Flame reach a moment where they realise that they are important, that their lives are worth living, that they are alive,” he says. “And so I decided that going back to do the play was important for me. It was probably one of the toughest things I have ever had to do – to leave my mum in that hospital – but in a strange way it helped me with the play as it enabled me to harness the emotions felt by my characters and use them in a positive way.”The day I met him, it was Hughes’ first day back in rehearsals after his week in Wales. He is 29, but the grey-brown shadows beneath his eyes, together with two days of stubble, give him the look of a man much older.