If the legacy of colonialism is a huge theme in Edinburgh this year, then no show on the Fringe addresses that legacy, and Scotland’s involvement in it, more directly than Mara Menzies’s Blood And Gold, a glittering, beautiful and disturbing one-hour monologue by one of Scotland’s leading theatre artists of African heritage.
In Blood and Gold, an exquisite piece of storytelling heavily abstracted from her own experience, Mara Menzies sets this idea in a mythical context. Drawing on her twin backgrounds in Scotland and Kenya, she reminds us of the former country’s uneasy history of colonialism before taking us to Africa for an Arabian Nights-like string of stories, all stalked by a metaphorical dark shadow.
The audience’s reaction to The Illusion of Truth was nothing less than breathtaking. Mara’s story built in a carefully controlled crescendo, whipping the audience into a quite astonishing frenzy of excitement. This was not simply a demonstration of a great performance, but an exposition of a form which is fundamentally interactive – a performance in which the audience was so deeply, personally implicated that at one point almost every single person in the auditorium jumped out of their seat with pure rapture.
