Review: Ascension

A man sits on a bare stage. He is preceded by a white bench…and however many days it has taken to reach this moment. As he contemplates existence, the audience contemplates him. This is how Ascension starts. The man, Dutch sailor Leendert Hasenbosch (Dan Hazelwood), has been exiled on an island as punishment for sodomy. The year is 1725. Probably. Hard to say for Ascension is uninhabited. What is certain is Leendert is dying. But he doesn’t want us to dwell on that right now. He’d first prefer for us to consider his story.

Leendert was reared by a religious family who lived somewhere near The Hague. As he works in a warehouse, a homosexual encounter takes place. Unfortunately for Lee, there was a witness, and not just any witness, but his employer who subsequently tries to extort him to save his father’s ears hearing of it. Fleeing the situation, Lee joins the Dutch East India Company as a soldier. He cannot; however, flee his own nature and is arrested on a ship then convicted of sodomy. Punishable by death, his captain decides instead to banish him to Ascension with just a cask of water, two buckets, an old frying pan, and seeds. The re-tell of his tenure on the island is parsed with the monotonic failure of his health. There is no fresh water source on Ascension. When his seeds fail to bear fruit his desperation rises: eating the raw flesh of a turtle and drinking its blood. Finally, with no rain, Lee resorts to drinking his own urine then, inevitably, sea-water.

Hazelwood’s intertext of Leendert’s diary, Sodomy Punish’d: Being a True and Exact Relation of what Befell to one Leondert Hussenlosh, uses intermediality to give Ascension a modern sensibility. It adds immediacy and emotional depth to hallucinatory scenes where Lee’s lover, Andrew (Conor Mainwaring), appears. Kristine Berget’s exquisite choreography combined with the masterful connection between Hazelwood and Mainwaring fully reify Lee and Andrew’s relationship. Over 55 minutes, the audience comes to appreciate the reason Lee takes such a risk: love.  

Directed by Max Lindsay, Ascension is beautifully poignant and mesmerically haunting. It reminds us, were it ever needed, that heteronormativity is dominant and that intolerance, despite all our attempts at correction over hundreds of years, is still but a breath away.

Ascension continues its run at Bedlam Theatre, Edinburgh, until 25th August