'100: Unearth' review or 'Pushing up the daisies?'

'100: Unearth', Wildworks
Lost Gardens of Heligan, 12th July 2018
Written for The Guardian 

Hidden among the roses, a soldier and his lover kiss goodbye. Through a clearing in the trees, blindfolded captives are repeatedly executed. Three men sit on a manicured lawn; roses bloom from their faces as bombs drop overhead. 100: UnEarth, part of the UK’s first world war centenary arts programme 14-18 NOW, is a fitfully moving promenade show, which asks the difficult question: how do we learn to live and love again after the devastation of war?

The show has been created by WildWorks, the site-specific Cornish theatre company founded by Bill Mitchell, who died last year. This is their second piece set in The Lost Gardens of Heligan, a beautiful and slightly eerie botanical garden that was, itself, almost wiped out by the war.

In the early scenes, the landscape and narrative merge to haunting effect. High on a hillside, a large community of women gather for dinner. A faint drum roll sounds, and, gradually, the horizon is filled with returning soldiers. Men and women stand frozen on opposite sides of the rolling fields, unable to breach the distance that war has placed between them. A sense of relief but also danger has come home with these men from war.

As the show progresses, writer Mercedes Kemp moves away from the community – made up of 120 local volunteers – and focuses instead on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This ancient myth, which sees Orpheus travel into the underworld to rescue his lover, feels like a distraction. The show’s tone and rhythm grow muddled, particularly when production designer Myriddin Pharo reimagines the gates of the underworld as an airport lounge overlooked by Nigel Barrett’s cocktail-swilling Hades. It’s a witty twist, but turns a potentially moving show into a bemusing one.

Smaller and less fussy moments hit home. We reach a fence covered with scraps of paper and are encouraged to record the moments we long to remember or hope to forget. Heads bent down in earnest recollection, we add our notes to the collection – private moments of sorrow or joy now written into the landscape.