How to adapt an unadaptable novel famed for its postmodern surrealism and authorial intrusions? For Los Angeles performer Gregory Nussen, there can be only one solution: a play built out of postmodern surrealism and authorial intrusions.
That is what becomes of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller as filtered, refracted and reinvented by Nussen and directed by Hannah Pilkes. What in 1979 was a head-spinning novel about the reader trying to make sense of the novel’s unrelated manuscripts becomes, with the actor’s charm, wit and storytelling chops, a playful one-person show that has a fierce political heart beneath its metatheatrical games.
QFWFQ, the name adopted by Calvino as a narrator, is about the power of storytelling and the power of those who tell the stories. Nussen is drawn to the narrative freedom of improvisation – an overheard keyboard workout in a Helsinki church, Keith Jarrett free-associating on a rehearsal piano on The Köln Concert – and to uncertain authorship, their interrupted tales repeatedly attributed to obscure European writers and never quite reaching resolution.
But the polemical force of the show lies in Nussen’s own story and their American Jewish upbringing. They describe a teenage summer-camp trip to Israel via Auschwitz as a form of coercion, not just to do the invaluable job of remembering the Holocaust, but to promote a sense of perpetual threat and victimhood.
The self-referential tricks fall into abeyance as Nussen rails against dominant narratives that have no place for them as a queer artist nor for the 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the foundation of Israel. If those other stories cannot be told with empathy and openness, they imply, then it is time to call the unreliable narrators to account.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August
