Showing @ Summerhall, Edinburgh until Sun 24 Aug (not 6, 13, 20) @ 18:00
Stepping into performer Geoff Sobelle’s The Object Lesson is like entering a garage on moving day: a visual reminder of the junk we all collect as the years pass. Sobelle Tetris-packs the space with tattered boxes, furniture, lamps and myriad objects that will all trigger memories for him throughout the show. From this laboratory of recollections, Sobelle pulls together the nucleus of a set from his surroundings and encourages us to sit, stand or lie anywhere with a vantage point to the “stage”.
A placid and pleasantly insightful show is unpacked in which Sobelle relives past girlfriends, holidays and experiences, some told through local cuisine found buried at the bottom of a box, others through receipts which timestamp the memory. We are free to move around the bunker (we must in fact, as the action plays out at different trajectories), which is liberating but punctures the narrative. While gentle, it becomes noticeably overlong towards the final third, which seems ironic in a show about clutter.