Amazons is dense with ideas and alternates between a mildly comic journey through family and a more serious analysis of the colonial past. An actor, holed up plant-sitting and awaiting their UK citizenship ceremony, decides to become a YouTube influencer and traces their personal history while attempting to reconcile their new citizenship with the vicious colonisation of their homeland, Brazil. Asking questions about the lost legacies of Amazonian women, and celebrating the community of women who cheerlead her successes, Gaël Le Cornec condemns the oppression of the Amazon by colonialists and provides a trenchant critique of the silencing of women’s voices,
The movement towards a more aggressive and passionate critique, however, is hampered by a meandering dramaturgy. The playfulness of the aunties’ chorus is warm but limits the subsequent emotional impact of the reformed stories of historical women: the forcefulness of reclaiming lost names is a sudden and powerful change of pace but feels incongruous. Serious issues – such as the erasure of cultures, the demands of the UK on migrants, even the potential of social media to share marginalised truths – jostle with the comedy. Amazons sketches out the territory without ultimately finding a consistent tone to do justice to its depth and breadth.
Amazons, Summerhall, until 25 Aug (not 11, 18), 7.50pm