Review: In the Land of Eagles, Edfringe

In the Land of Eagles does everything that theatre should do: it gives us a window into someone else’s world while illuminating and drawing forth our own.

The narrative begins by following writer and performer Alex Reynolds on a runaway jaunt through the backyard as a six-year-old, in which her grandfather comes to her rescue. Reynolds captures the hilarious dignity of childhood, with her six-year-old adventuresome self venturing “miles [a couple of yards] from the house”, her teddy bear losing one eye along the way as rain starts to fall, and she looks overhead to see “eagles! [pigeons]”.

The narrative picks up again later in her life with a crisis: grandpa asks to return one last time to his native Albania, and she offers to take him for a last-chance journey to his homeland – known in his dialect as ‘The Land of Eagles’. Reynolds has been learning about Albania in school from her Communist-obsessed history teacher (her assessment that “I can sympathise with the underdog, but not when it’s Stalin” draws one of many hearty belly laughs from the crowd). This is now one last opportunity to be reconciled with her grandfather; to go on an adventure of the magnitude her six-year-old self imagined.

Throughout the show, the duality of how Reynolds presents herself and integrates into a sometimes hostile and mocking external world contrasts with her confessional inner reality, giving us a rich picture of her interior life and of her relationship with her grandfather as it progresses from the hero-worship of early youth through a more strained relationship in her teens.

The many characters and her own points of view at different ages are portrayed with grace and commitment, flitting crisply back and forth between early years and the time of the journey between England and Albania. She is supported by rich, evocative sound design (by Nicola T. Chang) and lighting (by Rachel Sampley) that carries the audience skilfully from scene to scene with her.

The set design is brilliantly simple yet evocative: the backdrop is a set of clear plastic tubs containing objects calling forth elements of the story like a brass coffee maker, a Qur’an, a pair of glittery platform heels and a wooden statuette of a man on horseback. In the foreground one rug and one chair give Reynolds scope to play as she reconfigures the chair into trees, cars, museum placards, a headstone, a lounging teenager’s bed, and a school desk, among other settings.

At its grandest and most sweeping level the story invites us to reconsider those troublesome words: patriot, nationalism, immigrant, criminal. But the story never loses its roots in the intimacy of the grandfather-granddaughter relationship, and of Reynolds’s evolving relationship with herself.

The show breaks our hearts in the best possible way with a final twist that is the most poignant sting in the tail. Two people in my row needed to borrow tissues from me – which I gave sparingly because I needed them myself! In turns funny, touching, and tragic, In the Land of Eagles is a truly delightful world in miniature.

Written by: Alex Reynolds
Directed by: Martha Geelan
Sound Design by: Nicola T. Chang
Lighting Design by: Rachel Sampley
Produced by: Natalie Allison Productions and Alex Reynolds

In the Land of Eagles plays at The Pleasance Baby Grand for EdFringe until Monday 25 August.