Director: Simon McBurney
Choreographer: Crystal Pite
Creators: Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney
After last year’s triumph Assembly Hall, Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite returns to the Edinburgh International Festival, this time joining forces with English actor, playwright, and director Simon McBurney. Together they bring Figures in Extinction to the Festival Theatre, an ambitious trilogy of movement, image, and reflection that weds urgent ecological themes to extraordinary theatrical craft.
The opening act, [1.0] The List, turns its attention to extinction itself quite literally. Through intricate choreography, the dancers conjure the restless energy of vanished figures, giving fleeting life to what has already disappeared. At one point even a ‘climate crisis denier’ is named among the extinct, a wry reminder that disappearance can come not only through nature but through the dangerous absurdity of human denial. The act closes on the haunting question of a child: “Have they gone forever?”
The second act, [2.0] but then you come to the humans, focuses on rationalism, the intellectual current that has shaped our so-called civilisation since the Enlightenment. It begins with a group choreography evoking the overflow of information that overwhelms contemporary society and corrodes democracy. From here, McBurney shifts into a lecture on the division between the left and right brain. For him, the dominance of rationalism in modern society is inseparable from the rise of neoliberalism, climate crisis denial, consumerism, technological determinism, and humankind’s relentless drive to treat nature as its subject and conquer it. At one point, a live camera projects eerily magnified faces onto the back wall, producing an uncanny-valley style image that forces us to ask what it means to be human in a digital, information-saturated age and where we are going from here.
The final act, [3.0] Requiem, reaches further inward. Here the theme is not only the facts of extinction but what extinction really means to us: how the living relate to the dead, and what might endure when our own time runs out. Echoes from earlier acts, the skeleton of [1.0], the disconnection of [2.0], return, weaving into a meditation on loss, inheritance, and the slim possibility of hope.
Figures in Extinction is not a work that declares its message in a performative gesture. It demands patience, perhaps even more viewings, to absorb its layers of words, gestures, movements, images, collective efforts, and its mise en scène as a trilogy born of collaboration. But the reward is profound. With all the references, inspirations, and human inquiries listed on the International Festival’s website, it becomes clear that the work is not an intellectual riddle to be cracked or a unified thesis to be analysed. Rather than parading its own intelligence or pointing fingers, the piece approaches its audience with humility and empathy. It does not prescribe solutions but instead provokes reflection, offering a shared space to listen, to see, to debate and hopefully to act. It is less a puzzle than an invocation of primal feeling: care, empathy, kindness. In its patience and humanity, Figures in Extinction insists that theatre’s greatest power lies not in answers but in the questions it dares us to answer, or, in the words of this year’s International Festival, the truth we seek.
Runs until 24 August 2025
The Reviews Hub Star Rating
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10
