Begin to believe in this supernatural lecture
Piskie
Summerhall (Venue 26) until 26 August
JJJJ
Disenchanted lecturer Dr Ouida Burt tells us: “Fantasy is one of the first games we learn in childhood. It’s a game of belief.” The character delivers an academic lecture on the supernatural to her audience – and a lecture theatre in former academic building Summerhall is the perfect place for this – but does she personally embrace either the rational or the superstitious?
Burt is played by the play’s writer Lucy Roslyn with a down-to-earth affability which recreates the tone of an ordinary university lecture – but other forces are at work here. More than once the lights flicker, while it becomes clear that Burt’s investigations into the supposedly supernatural and its potential origins mask a mystery she has been carrying with her for a long time.
As Burt meanders into discussions of the academic stress she is feeling and her supposedly fraught relationship with her head of department, the character reveals details of the disappearance of her own father in a sleepwalking incident when she was a child, and the coping mechanism she developed for her grief.
On Dartmoor in her native Devon, there are old legends of piskies (pixies) which stalk the moors, and to replace her father she has invited one into her own home as an imaginary friend.
Even when an unexpected manifestation occurs, the sense of eerie otherworldliness may still be accounted for by the character’s mental turmoil and trauma as much as any other unnatural phenomena. Burt’s stress begins to show, and Roslyn paints a compelling portrait of a person who has not come to terms with their grief – yet there is something more subtle going on beneath the layers of her play.
Under cover of an intriguingly presented piece of cosy folk horror, if such a genre exists, Piskie asks what role hope plays in many people’s willingness to believe the unlikely, from ghost story to conspiracy theories. Or, as Roslyn’s text so cleverly puts it: is the house haunted or are you?