The Stage

The Tree of Knowledge

Published Monday 12 December 2011 at 18:10 by Thom Dibdin

Big in ideas and bearing a mixture of fruits - some juicy and all tasty - Jo Clifford’s Tree of Knowledge has its roots in the Scottish Enlightenment and its head in the clouds of a 21st-century mobile economy.

Joanna Tope and Gerry Mulgrew in The Tree of Knowledge at the Traverse, Edinburgh Photo: Robbie Jack

David Hume (a delightfully gruff and pompous Gerry Mulgrew) and Adam Smith (a hugely surprised and excited Neil McKinven) wake from the dead. They find themselves, still in their easy chairs, in a corridor of what looks like the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood.

Under Ben Harrison’s direction this sets off in a magnificently ebullient and entertaining manner. Hume pondering what the witness of his senses in this theatre - deduced from examining the audience - makes of his own elegant proof of the non-existence of an afterlife. Smith coming out of his shell to discover first hand what the free-market economy in gay sex might be like.

The grounding for it all comes from Eve (Joanna Tope). From her 1960s modernist chair, hung from the ceiling like a world, she whisks Hume off to examine her previous existence in a different Scottish new town - Glenrothes. On the production line of a silicone-chip factory, the embodiment of Smith’s economic theories, she tells of her own emancipation that came, ironically, from her own men’s fall.

The result is strong, provocative and fascinating. Blasting the current model of capitalism, it examines the lack of humanity, of personal relationships and of reason in contemporary society. It never quite gets to grip with itself, however. Tope’s Eve is just too ephemeral to convince as the unwitting engineer of this strange meeting.