Piano Noir: Will Pickvance
★★★☆☆ Crowd pleaser
Summerhall (Venue 26): Sat 16/Sun 17 Aug 2025
Review by Salvador Kent
Will Pickvance’s new hour, Piano Noir is a virtuosic feat with plenty of ideas and a meta-theatrical bent. It is musically sound and immersive and clever, even if its conclusion fails to convince.
A dead man plays mournful piano. So begins Will Pickvance’s new reflection on the tripartite relationship between artist, form and audience. Pickvance is the artist, the piano the form, and we’re the audience. Guided through a pianist’s life, he shows his relationship to music change as his work abandons the classical masters he once loved to appeal to an audience that want tunes from a large “Bible” of kitschy crowd pleasers.
Will Pickvance. Publicity image for Piano Noir.
Pickvance is a wonderful performer. He draws his audience in convincingly and wittily. He’s not just a great pianist, but has moments of theatrical inventiveness too. The first image feels haunting and Beckettian. A harbour is simply evoked with a real intensity.
But what a pianist he is. Interpretations of Chopin, Satie and particularly Bach are complex and have flair. Refrains of Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel are the spine of the piece (German for mirror(s) in the mirror(s) – “How much more self-reflective can you get?!” Pickvance jokes). The use of this particular piece might be evoked in reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s Dans le noir du temps which is similarly an artist’s reflection of their art in the face of death. When playing the role of more simple entertainer, he draws the crowd in with renditions of The Beatles’ Hey Jude amongst other classics, and the crowd dutifully join in.
He performs acrobatic tricks such as playing the piano upside down. He plays his character with real reflection, and evokes the spaces the work demands him to evoke. You feel him playing for disinterested punters on a cruise ship, you feel him playing drunkenly when that’s what gets him through the night, you feel him playing as a child discovering music. Pickvance is the beating heart of the hour and is graceful and funny whilst still being virtuosic – this is undoubtable.
a shadow of doubt
What does cast a shadow of doubt over the whole affair is the basic thesis of the work. It seems to suggest that no matter the relationship between artist and form, it would all be impossible without an audience. This is true, but when the way Pickvance demonstrates this by playing some crowd pleasing pop songs and getting the audience to join in – does in some ways diminish the integrity of his reflections on life and art in the first third.
Furthermore, the wonderful existential bent that incites the play is abandoned in lieu of getting the audience to clap along to Hey Jude. To do this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – but there might be a much more pressing version of this work with pathos at its ending, whereas at the moment, it seems to retreat into keeping an audience entertained, again not a bad thing, but here is a work with the potential to conclude with a much more striking point, and didn’t take that opportunity.
Still, this is a huge crowd pleaser. Pickvance delights his audience and receives rapturous applause. His interpretation of music is thoughtful and compelling, and his taste is brilliant too. Whilst the thesis does not convince, this is still an engaging hour, and Pickvance is a great pianist.
Running time: One hour (no interval).
Summerhall (Anatomy Lecture Theatre), 1 Summerhall, EH9 1PL. (Venue 26).
Sat 16/Sun 17.
Both dates: 5.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
Book here on Love the Fringe.com*.
Summerhall website: https://www.summerhallarts.co.uk/
Will Pickvance website: www.willpickvance.com
Facebook: @pickvance
Instagram: @willpickvance
YouTube: @willpickvance4078
Linktree: @willpickvance
*affiliate link.
ENDS
