As Square Peg Contemporary Circus opens by acknowledging, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sprawling supernatural poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of the most famous stories in English literature. This new adaptation is therefore wise to approach the familiar tale from a novel direction, exploring the contours of Coleridge’s poetry not through words or visual wizardry, but through the performers’ own astonishing physicality.

In the bare, atmospheric surroundings of Summerhall’s ominously named Dissection Room, Square Peg transform the basic scaffold skeleton of their set into the masts and rigging of a ship, their tilting bodies transporting us to rough seas. The performers seem to be reeled in and spat out by the ocean, limbs furled and unfurled to the pulse of the waves. In this circus- and dance-inflected reimagining of Coleridge’s poem, the fateful encounter between mariner and albatross becomes a charged and dangerous dance, drawing out the sudden senselessness of the mariner’s act of violence. 

While the sometimes superfluous movement could be more closely wedded to Coleridge’s content, the dizzying acrobatics that spring off from his poetry are gasp-inducingly spectacular. In one moment of collective held breath, three performers create a gravity-defying human column; earlier in the piece, another gracefully whirls and contorts while dangling precariously from a cord, seemingly held up by the air itself.

Coleridge’s well known text, which we receive only through a few selected snippets, receives no dazzling new illumination as a result of this physical trickery. There are moments, however, when Square Peg’s striking, carefully assembled aesthetic hits perceptively on the ghostly quality of the writing, melting together arrestingly strange movement and haunting a cappella song. Much like the mariner himself, roaming from place to place with the curse of his memories, Square Peg hold “strange power of speech” to keep us rapt by their distinctive method of storytelling.

Square Peg's Rime has now ended its Edinburgh run. Find out more about the company.

Photos by Jassy Earl.

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