The Wood Paths – Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

Reviewer: Matin Cheung

Director: Andrejs Jarovojs

Two men, Rūdolfs Gediņš and Edgars Samītis, stare at a large white paper curtain as the shadows of wooden pallets are projected onto it. A printer quietly produces a dialogue between two beings searching for a place to belong. Nearby sit two sets of tools, axes and electric screwdrivers with handheld lights. From these simple gestures and objects, Latvian director Andrejs Jarovojs introduces The Wood Paths as a playful speculative instrument, one that suggests the work could unfold in any direction.

As the performance progresses, heavy hardwood logs slowly emerge from behind the curtain, joined by the pallets we have been staring at all along. The two men begin chopping the logs into smaller pieces, first into uneven thirds, then halves, then halves again. When the pieces are placed upright next to one another, they form something resembling a forest of their own, but also a graveyard of trees, a field of gravestones in different shapes and sizes. As the sound of wood chopping and laboured breathing fills the theatre, the scene takes on the quality of a strange masculine ritual, an exercise that recalls Evil Does Not Exist in its attention to labour, nature, and moral unease.

Yet the performance takes an unexpected turn. The pallets are dismantled and reassembled into a cube that initially evokes Pandora’s box. Later, by the end of the show, this same structure transforms into something far more hopeful. Throughout this process, the men take turns embodying interesting and joyful symbols of industrialisation and nature, staging a metaphor for the complex relationship between humans and the spirits of the natural world, a relationship marked by fear, conflict, and recurring tension.

In its imaginative and brilliant way, The Wood Paths offers no answers or solutions. Like a good poem, it is neither overtly provocative nor sentimental, yet it leaves a lingering aftertaste that is difficult to describe. It draws you back, again and again, to the many things that remain fascinating precisely because they continue to make you think and feel.

Reviewed on 10 February 2026