Movement and Shadows
Until January 15; Royal Museum, Edinburgh

I’m ushered into a dimly-lit room along with a handful of other visitors. We’re surrounded by sleeping machinery, lurid green shadows making silhouettes on the walls. A silent organ-grinder stares down at us with his animal eyes. At any moment, he and hundreds of other unnoticed wooden creatures with their scrap-yard mechanisms might spring to life.

It’s pretty creepy, so I’m not surprised to see two very young kids crumpling in fear. Their fear turns to tears when the horned creature clanks into action, grinding his old clothes ringer to the gravelly singing of Russian exile, Boris Axelrod. This one-legged figure is, we’re told, a self-portrait by the man who made all nine “kinemats” in the show, Eduard Bersudsky.

Bersudsky founded Sharmanka Theatre along with Tatyana Jakovskaya in St Petersburg in the late 1980s. The company, now based in Glasgow’s King Street, made the Millennium Clock for Edinburgh’s Royal Museum in 1999. Despite the profoundly dark nature of its content, which symbolises the human suffering of the 20th century, the clock has proven to be a consistently popular asset for the Museum.

Every time I see a crowd of toddlers huddled around it, I wonder why their parents have brought them to see the harrowing carvings of rape, torture and religious persecution. The truth is, the children are enchanted by the whirring monkeys and dancing cogs and wheels. This is a peculiarly Eastern European ability, to deliver the most profound horror alongside an innocent playfulness in one powerful package.

Half an hour disappears in an instant, as you are ushered from one kinemat to the next, each taking its turn to light up and perform to music. It’s over all too quickly, leaving you little time to linger over individual carvings, but the cumulative effect is enthralling.

At the top of Titanic, a top-hatted monkey-man swings two balls on ropes. The effect of the multi-coloured shadows he casts behind and above him is balletic. The dark days of Stalinism are explored in strong visual metaphors, such as Crusader, a barbarous collection of weapons on wheels which rolls forward and back, whirring and stabbing.

Movement and Shadows offers a unique combination of innocence and experience. Although there are no carvings quite as explicit as those in the Clock, there are a few pretty scary monsters to negotiate. Parents take heed – under-fives, like the two in my group, will be out of the door like a shot.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.12.05