The Infamous Brothers Davenport, theatre review

Seen at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Four stars
IN the theatre is a stage. On the stage is a panelled room. In the panelled room is a wardrobe. In the wardrobe is a music box. Like Russian dolls, these boxes within boxes promise revelations, but provide only further layers of obfuscation.

Just as the music box dulls the sound of domestic violence coming from a neighbouring room, so the bigger boxes divert us from the truth about life and death. Set in the era of the Great Lafayette, Peter Arnott's play is about two Victorian magicians whose "spirit box" offers the bereaved and the credulous the possibility of talking to those beyond the grave.

Their act may be "a crime against reason", but it is slick enough to captivate Lady Noyes-Woodhull (Anita Vettesse), whose husband is presumed dead in darkest Africa. Determined to think rationally, this "spiritual scientist" finds the desire to believe in the mystical too strong to resist once the brothers Davenport - based on two real 19th-century illusionists - perform their act.

It's the same for the 21st-century audience, some of whom end up on stage wearing Victorian garb in this playful, magic-infused production by Jamie Harrison and Candice Edmunds for Vox Motus and the Lyceum. As much as any supernaturalist, we want to believe Scott Fletcher, as Willie Davenport, really can communicate with his dead sister and that their "spectacular stage seance" is more than the trick his real-life brother Ryan Fletcher says it is.

It's as if The Infamous Brothers Davenport is pulling a sleight of hand on us. We come to the theatre in search of spiritual truth, but find only flying tambourines and levitating tables. The show dazzles and delights, makes us laugh and jump, but stops short of giving us the insight into mortality it promises. And that may be the point.
© Mark Fisher, 2012
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TV Preview: Late ‘n’ Live Guide to Comedy

More on this story on the Edinburgh Fringe Survival Guide blog

Published in the Scotsman

SOME call it the comedians' graveyard. Others say it's the best gig on the circuit. For 25 years, Late 'n' Live has been an Edinburgh Fringe institution, a place where major-league stand-ups, including Bill Bailey, Russell Brand, Johnny Vegas and Ross Noble, have tested their mettle against the most raucous of crowds. 

Now the Gilded Balloon's late-night showcase is being celebrated in a four-part BBC documentary, featuring archive footage and face-to-face interviews with comedians who have faced the industry's toughest audience and lived to tell the tale. It features outrageous moments of comic spontaneity including a crowd-surfing bicycle, a crowd-surf race between John Bishop and Patrick Monahan, and the night Scott Capurro wet the stage.

The series is narrated by Lynn Ferguson, one of Late 'n' Live's most fearless compères, who looks back at her time in this comedic bearpit with a sense of wonderment. Now living in LA, she wonders how she could ever have taken this outpouring of comic creativity for granted. Having spent days trawling through the archive clips, she can't get over the brilliance of her fellow comedians as they tried to master this most punishing of gigs.

"From a distance, it just made me respect them all," she says. "Because I'm not doing stand-up any more, I looked at it and it was awesome. It made me look at them with admiration - probably more than when I was working with them. They manage to show who they really are on stage. I have such a lot of respect for them."

Having been given her green card last summer, the Cumbernauld-born writer and performer is now resident in the USA where, until last year, she was providing comic material for her brother Craig on The Late Late Show, one of the country's biggest chat shows. Having done that for two-and-a-half years, she's been working for Pixar, doing the occasional ad campaign and the odd voiceover, and polishing up other people's film scripts. 

Hanging out with the movie industry professionals of California is very different from the cut-and-thrust of Late 'n' Live, but having played ringmaster there, she feels there's nothing she can't do.

"It's that thing of acknowledging trouble," she says. "I was never one for having an awful lot of material anyway, but I used to compère Late 'n' Live expecting stuff to happen at any point."

On one occasion, she walked on stage and had to stop the gig before she'd said a single word. A man at the front was chanting an obscenity, endlessly repeating the same rude word. She called the bouncers straight away. "Only at Late 'n' Live would you have to stop a show before it even starts," she laughs. "If the compère at the start is getting that kind of abuse, then there's nowhere for an act to go. You get great quality heckles if the mood is right, but if you're in the audience and no-one takes control of a guy like that, then you get angry as well because you've paid your money."

With shows that don't start until 1am, the audience is in high spirits, especially at weekends, and are ready to give as good as they get. Being comedy aficionados, they're likely to have seen the comedians performing their regular sets, so they're ready for something different. It means even a seasoned entertainer has their work cut out for them. "Comedians would have running bets against themselves," says Ferguson. "They would do five appearances at Late 'n' Live in one festival and, say, three they'd win and two they'd lose - or maybe they'd lose all five."

The more anarchic stand-ups thrive in this atmosphere, though whether it's actually good for them is another matter. "In the middle of it, there's this bizarre footage of Johnny Vegas getting pelted with coins," she says. "In the footage of Russell Brand, he's completely off his face and for him it was like a near-death experience, and it was one of many where he eventually decided to cut the drugs and get clean."

Other comedians contributing to the series include Jenny Éclair, Rich Hall, Andrew Maxwell, Jason Byrne and Fred MacAulay. Ferguson is delighted not only by their wit, but by their willingness to open up and describe what it felt like to face the Late 'n' Live audience. "Because people are watching themselves when they're pretty vulnerable, you get a really interesting insight into how comedy is constructed," she says. "Dara Ó Briain gives really good comments about what comedy is, how it's made, what the meaning of it is, how it works and what stand-ups are thinking when they're doing it. It's like this great big series of turning points for a lot of different people, but there are jokes all the way through it."
• Late 'n' Live Guide to Comedy, BBC1 Scotland, from 23 January.

© Mark Fisher, 2011
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Too Many Penguins?, theatre review

Published in the Scotsman
MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling

YOU know that feeling when you've invited the relatives over for Christmas and it seems more and more keep showing up? You just don't know where to put them all.
 
That's the dilemma faced by little Penguina in Frozen Charlotte's delightful show for the under-threes.
 
She's happily sharing her wintry landscape with Mr Polaro, an unusually tolerant polar bear in charge of the upkeep of the lighthouse, when a tiny penguin drops by in a hot air balloon. There's ample room in her tent for this one but, before she knows it, there's a car-load of fluffy penguins driving up and then still more disembarking from a boat.
 
Played with eccentric charm by Nicola Jo Cully, Penguina is the hospitable type and she gamely does what she can to accommodate them all. But we've already seen she can be a bit of a scamp herself, and it's not long before the penguins are everywhere but where they should be.
 
In Heather Fulton's quietly inventive production, they show up spinning on Mr Polaro's record player, in his drawers and underneath his armchair. How they find their way there on Katy Wilson's Arctic set, with its red-and-white stripes echoing the black-and-white penguin, is a little bit of theatrical magic.
 
As every two year-old knows, however, there's no such thing as too many penguins and, as the creatures multiply like the brooms in Disney's Fantasia, the children's pleasure grows accordingly. They need little persuasion to join a rock'n'roll penguin dance for the happy, cuddly finale.
Rating: ****
© Mark Fisher, 2011
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Sleeping Beauty, theatre review

Published in the Guardian
King’s Theatre, Glasgow
Three stars

AS Karl Marx nearly said, history repeats itself – the first time as pop music, the second time as panto. Whoever would have thought, watching Altered Images on Top of the Pops in 1981 that, 30 years later, we would see Clare Grogan in a spangly purple witch costume singing Happy Birthday to Princess Beauty, the night before the girl comes of age, with only a phalanx of dancing toys to foil her evil plan? When she segues into Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), only those of us of a certain age can remember it wasn't even one of hers.

Call it celebrity casting if you like, but Grogan adapts pleasingly well to the role of bad fairy Carabosse, turning in an imperious performance and relishing every wicked spell and curse. "In my kingdom, we don't get old, we stay like this for ever," she says, and every ex-Smash Hits reader is more than ready to believe it.

But if the star is holding back on the Gregory's-Girl-next-door charm, there are many other people on this stage eager to win our affections. Rather too many, in fact. Are we to root for Karen Dunbar's sneaker-footed Nanny Moira McClonky, good with a corny gag and her love of a singalong? Or should we be backing Arron Usher's cheery-if-perfunctory Jimmy Jingles the Jester? Should we, indeed, be seduced by Tony Roper's bad-boy Hector, who ends up with many of the show's best lines?

The answer is uncertain, which makes it hard to locate the heart of the production (it's not in the insipid romance, at any rate). The show is full of the customary King's generosity, raucousness and joy and, in Eric Potts's script, it has proper respect for the story, but it doesn't hit that extra level of sublime silliness of which this team is capable.

© Mark Fisher, 2011
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The Tree of Knowledge, theatre review

Published in the Guardian
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars

DAVID Hume is getting maudlin. He has found out that, far from liberating the workforce, the free market has turned the workers into drones. Three centuries after the Enlightenment philosopher's birth, that's not the way he hoped things would turn out.

Adam Smith sees things differently. He has discovered ecstasy and the iPhone, and is delighted the market is giving humanity undreamt of pleasures. Only 12 years Hume's junior, the founding father of modern economics is looking the more sprightly by decades. Casting aside his work-ethic repressions, he legs it to the theatre bar in pursuit of anonymous sex.

These are the two impulses driving Jo Clifford's funny and wordy drama, low on action but high on discursiveness, in which the great 18th-century Edinburgh thinkers find themselves propelled into a contemporary world of microchips, instant messaging and cameraphones. That it's also a world of violence, alienation and atomisation is a conundrum they find hard to resolve.

The contradictions of capitalism perplex us all. That's why, in Ben Harrison's cleanly staged production, the house lights come up and Gerry Mulgrew's ever-inquisitive Hume gives the audience the once over. From his point of view, we are in a place "where people's creative energies have been set free by commerce". But as Neil McKinven's Smith discovers, it's a freedom eroded by the market's intrusion into our private lives. Money can't buy him love.

As the fallout from the banking crisis continues to grip Europe, Clifford contends we should neither continue in the same way, nor condemn our post-Enlightenment advances. Refusing to apologise for tasting the fruits of Eden, Joanna Tope's modern-day Eve exonerates Smith and Hume of responsibility for the market's excesses and reminds us of the deep humanity that underscored their vision. And you can't put a price on that.

© Mark Fisher, 2011 (pic: Robbie Jack)
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Hansel and Gretel, theatre review

Published in the Guardian
Two stars
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
IN his Christmas shows for the Citz, playwright Alan McHugh has shown a particular fascination for the character the author Christopher Booker identifies as the "dark mother". The stepmother in his Cinderella verged on the psychotic, while the creature in his Beauty and the Beast was haunted by the witch who had transformed him.
 
Those plays tapped into the deep archetypal forces of the originals and were rich and troubling. In taking a similar approach to Hansel and Gretel, by contrast, McHugh throws the story off kilter.
 
Instead of the tale of two youngsters forced to make their own way in a dangerous world, he favours the story of a 1,000-year-old witch who will die unless she tricks the children's father into falling in love with her. Having turned their mother into a wolf, this magpie-like Vanya dominates the first half as she wheedles her way into their cottage. She is equally inescapable in the second half as the owner of the edible house.
 
Her overbearing presence casts an air of pessimism over Guy Hollands's production; what hope of freedom can poor Hansel and Gretel have? It's not helped by Jennifer Harraghy's decision to play Vanya as Victorian melodrama, all over-emphasis, endless cackling and heavy signalling of her every deceit. A psychologically credible approach would have been more frightening.
 
The lush arrangements of Claire McKenzie's live score add moments of reflection, but though her songs are well-sung, they only delay the opportunity to follow David Carlyle and Gemma McElhinney into the forest.
 
The show works best when focusing on these two bickering children, and the two actors generate much sympathy. Even at the end, however, Hansel and Gretel survive thanks not to their own resourcefulness but to their father's last-minute intervention. That is symptomatic of a play that is too concerned with the grownups.

© Mark Fisher, 2011 (pic: Richard Campbell)
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A Christmas Carol, theatre review

Published in the Guardian
Five stars
WICKED witches and angry giants may be stalking stages across the land, but none can be as terrifying as the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future that haunt this tremendous adaptation of the Dickens novella.
 
The first venture into the seasonal market by the National Theatre of Scotland, Graham McLaren's production begins in an atmosphere of prank-playing jollity as the cast welcomes us into the offices of Scrooge and Marley, tearing up our tickets and showing us to our seats, but switches into the realm of gothic horror once it's time for Scrooge to face his demons.
 
Performed in a small room in the former Govan Town Hall, the walls stacked high with ledgers and scrolls, the show brings us distressingly close to the story's terrors. Benny Young makes an austere Presbyterian Scrooge, gaunt, grubby and humourless; the last man you'd ever feel sympathy for. Yet when Gavin Glover's superlative puppets magically appear through the apparently solid walls of the set, they have such a fearsome, otherworldly demeanour, you can only feel for the guy.
 
The spirit of Jacob Marley, manipulated by three of the five-strong ensemble, is a rasping, skeletal creature, wrapped in bandages that seemingly stretch down into the underworld. Accompanied by a rumbling live score by Jon Beales, his is the first of a series of visitations: a floating, ethereal Ghost of Christmas Past; a towering, silent Ghost of Christmas Future; talking shadows on the walls, and a sad vision of a blue-faced Cratchit family.
 
It is rare to see horror so intensively evoked in the theatre, but it's not only for effect. Rather than being a sentimental portrait of a man who doesn't like Christmas, this is an evocation of an unjust society - the true horror of Dickens's tale - and a powerful broadside against anyone who thinks there's no such thing as society.
 
© Mark Fisher, 2011 (pic: Peter Dibdin)
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Clare Grogan and Karen Dunbar interview

Published in the Scotsman

KAREN Dunbar is remembering her very first entrance in the panto at the King’s, Glasgow. It felt like she was covered in bubble wrap, she says. For all her experience doing karaoke and comedy, she had never performed anything quite like it. Her nerves made her dead to the world.

That was in 2007, when she played Nanny Begood in Sleeping Beauty, a role she took to – nerves or not – like she was born to it. She matched the late Gerard Kelly laugh for laugh and turned in several songs to boot. She was right to be nervous because of the place the King’s panto has in the hearts of Glasgow audiences but, in the end, she needn’t have worried.

Today, sharing a couch with Dunbar in a rehearsal break, is Clare Grogan – and all this talk of stage fright is making her uncomfortable. As she prepares to make her own panto debut, the Gregory’s Girl star looks at Dunbar with a mixture of admiration and awe. Knowing Dunbar was in the cast was one of the reasons she agreed to do the show (“I think she’s amazing”), but rehearsals are intense and she’s feeling the pressure.

“The first couple of days in rehearsals, my head was exploding with ‘How am I going to do this?’” she says. “It’s much harder than I thought it was going to be. For me, it’s such a different discipline.”

As the King’s returns to the story of Sleeping Beauty – this time scripted by Ayrshire-born Coronation Street star Eric Potts – it is once again fielding Dunbar as Nanny and, this time, placing her opposite Grogan as the wicked fairy Carabosse. Also in the cast is Tony Roper, playing Grogan’s evil henchman Hector.

Now it’s Grogan’s turn to feel the trepidation Dunbar experienced four years ago, but she is taking heart from the fond memories she has of her own panto-going days.

“What was really lovely about the first few days of rehearsal was there was a lot of talk about the history of panto and our own experience as children going to pantomimes,” she says, recalling trips to the King’s and the Pavilion where she would see Francie and Josie, Rikki Fulton and Stanley Baxter.

“The more you think about it, the more affectionate you feel about it. It does take you back to being that child and the magic of that big night out. But it’s bloody hard work. It all looks like a laugh, but that laugh is very, very carefully orchestrated.”

After her own panto debut, Dunbar went on to star in Cinderella and Aladdin, but skipped last year because she was performing in Men Should Weep at the National Theatre in London. She’s delighted to be back.

“The panto pulled all my assets together,” says Dunbar, who rose to fame in Chewin’ the Fat. “Jumping up and down, telling bad jokes, pulling faces, singing at the pitch of my lungs and overacting. I was born for it. I knew I would enjoy it, but it far exceeded my expectations of how much I would enjoy it – and how much hard work it was.”

For Grogan it has been most fruitful to draw not on her acting work but on her early-1980s career with Altered Images. Her last stage appearance was in Lobster and Vantastic, a double-bill of plays by Russell Barr at London’s Ovalhouse theatre, where the audience numbers 250. Sleeping Beauty is on an altogether different scale.

“My singing experience and playing those big arena tours is the thing that helps me, because you have to connect with the big audience,” she says. “Your performance has to be so much bigger. You really do have to find that person at the back of the auditorium who’s not quite into it. I just can’t have that: I will find those people and force them into engaging. Otherwise, why are you there?”

Adding to the challenge, Grogan has had to hot-foot it to Bristol every time she’s had a day off from rehearsals. She’s starring in the next series of Skins – playing Shelley, the fun-loving mother of Mini McGuinness (Edinburgh’s Freya Mavor) – and when shooting overran she had to find a way of squeezing in filming around her commitments in Glasgow. “Why would it have to be Bristol?” she laughs. “We couldn’t get farther apart.”

For those of us who grew up in love with Grogan as the fey young singer with Altered Images, singing ephemeral pop songs about birthdays and being happy, it takes some adjustment to realise she’s now playing mothers of teenagers and pantomime villains. Also newly in the can is The Wee Man, a film based on the life of Glasgow gangster Paul Ferris, played by Martin Compston, with Grogan as his mum. She, however, is unfazed by her own altered image.

“Playing a naughty mum is not too much of a stretch,” she says. “When I told my daughter [seven-year-old Elle Lucia] that I was going to be in Sleeping Beauty my poor, gorgeous, lovely little girl was so excited because she presumed I was going to be the beauty! I had to tell her it came as a bit of a shock to mum too that I’m no longer eligible even for consideration for that role. But it honestly doesn’t bother me. I like it.”

For one thing, it shows she is not being cast for her reputation alone: “I started acting in earnest after I made Comfort and Joy [Bill Forsyth’s 1984 film about warring ice-cream vendors]. Up until that point, I was the pop star that was being allowed to make the Bill Forsyth films. From that point, I really wanted to be a jobbing actress. It was really tricky, but I feel at last people are seeing me as a character. I feel proud of that. I’m getting to play all these different parts and they’re not based on how you look.”

Playing against type or not, she’s relishing the chance to play the wicked fairy. She says she was never interested in having to look nice and this is a role that allows her to look quite the opposite. “I’m interested in how far I can push it because I really want to terrify the kids. The baddies are the best. I’m flattered and bemused that everyone has said they can’t imagine me playing the baddie. Believe me: I’ve got a lot of evil and bitter-and-twisted in me and I’m getting my chance to unleash it.”

So, finally, does Dunbar have any words of wisdom for newbie Grogan? “If there was any worthwhile advice, I would say don’t arrange to see anybody,” she laughs. “I’m a big ball of energy, I’m like a five-year-old, but I tire out so easily on this. In fact, I sleep in between the shows. I slept in the rehearsal room under the radiator yesterday for 20 minutes. It does feel like the marathon of jobs. At least in Chewin’ the Fat or The Karen Dunbar Show, I got to go home at night. With this, bed becomes the loveliest thing you’ve ever seen – and clean sheets on the bed … ah!”

• Sleeping Beauty is at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, until 8 January.

© Mark Fisher, 2011
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Elaine C Smith on the HMT panto and SuBo musical

Published in Scotland on Sunday

IT WOULD be no surprise if Alex Salmond was the butt of a pantomime joke or two this season, but only at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, can you see a routine that comes at the First Minister's personal request.
 
As the MSP for Aberdeenshire East, Salmond takes a special interest in the HMT panto and, this time, he got a suggestion in early.
 
"The last couple of years he's come to see the show and brings all his office staff," says Elaine C Smith, who stars as Fairy Flora MacDonald. "He loves pantomime - he loves Parliament, what's the difference? - and he said, 'If you're doing Aberdeen, you should do The Quine Who Does The Strip At Inverurie.' It was by June Imrie, who was a famous Grampian TV newsreader and she did this song at New Year. He prodded us in that direction and when I listened to it, I thought, 'We could do something funny with that.'"
 
So after a sketch in which she makes a mangled attempt at getting her chops around a few choice phrases in the Doric, Smith will be launching into a reworked version of the comic song, discarding bloomers and sundry panto garments as she goes, before revealing an Aberdeen football strip. Let's hope Wee Eck approves.
 
It's Smith's third year in the city and she has become something of an institution, although the prospect of the Rab C Nesbitt star returning for a fourth consecutive year is uncertain. Having been cast to play Susan Boyle in a forthcoming stage bio-drama, she is likely to find herself tied up for some time.
 
Telling the rags-to-riches story of the Britain's Got Talent singer, I Dreamed A Dream launches in Newcastle in March for an initial 11-city UK tour that includes Aberdeen and Inverness. Boyle herself will appear on stage for the show's finale.
 
At some point after that, the show is set to go international. Thanks to the power of YouTube, SuBo's Cinderella-like story is a global phenomenon, and news of the show even made the New York Times. Edinburgh-trained producer Michael Harrison is in discussion with US promoters about taking it over there, perhaps with simultaneous productions on both sides of the Atlantic and in Australia. More dates in the UK and a run in the West End also seem likely.
 
It means that Smith, who has agreed not to talk in detail about the show until the press campaign in February, will either be otherwise engaged or catching her breath come the next panto season.
 
Her involvement came after a chance remark made by Boyle in a TV interview. She was asked who she'd like to play her in a film of her life and, being a long-time fan of Mary Doll in Rab C Nesbitt, she gave an answer that sent Smith's website into overdrive. "I joked to Michael Harrison that we should do the stage show," says Smith. "He laughed then phoned me back ten minutes later and said we should do it now."
 
However well known Smith is, her fame is nothing on a SuBo scale and the level of attention generated by the story made her think carefully about the responsibility. "I never think it's a shoo-in," she says. "It's got to be theatrical, it's got to be relevant and it's got to connect."
 
Only two years ago, Smith was bringing the house down with a SuBo routine in Cinderella, her first HMT panto, and now she'll be playing her straight. The panto connection doesn't end there. Alan McHugh, Smith's co-writer on I Dreamed A Dream, is the writer of Jack And The Beanstalk and stars as dame Heather MacBlether. He'll also have a part in the SuBo show. Meanwhile, in Kennedy Aitchison, the two shows share a musical director.
 
This is the tight creative team - plus director Alex Norton - that prompted Scotsman theatre critic Joyce McMillan to call the HMT production "probably the best traditional panto in Scotland". "I feel very creative in this environment," says Smith, who insists the principal performers have an extra week of rehearsal. "It drives me crazy that the most expensive and technically difficult shows of the year get two weeks to rehearse."
 
Smith, after all, takes her panto seriously. When she took time out to do a BA in drama at Edinburgh's Queen Margaret University a few years ago, she wrote her thesis on the history of pantomime. Sitting in the HMT's glass-fronted restaurant, she talks unprompted for a healthy ten minutes on her love of this vibrant popular tradition, name-checking everything from an 1811 panto called Harlequin in Leith to the razzamatazz of Stanley Baxter and the off-beat reinventions of Borderline and Wildcat theatre companies.
 
"There is a notion that because it's fun and because it looks easy, the skills involved are not the same skills that are involved in doing an Ibsen, but they are," says the actor, who'll be making a spectacular entrance flying over the heads of the audience. "The skills are very important and very few people can do them. Loads of panto actors can do straight, but put that the other way round, it doesn't necessarily work. If Irn-Bru's our other national drink, then panto is the other national theatre."
 
From her point of view, a show such as Jack And The Beanstalk will work only if she throws caution to the wind. "You've got to come down to the audience and go, 'I'm going to make an arse of myself,'_" she says. "If you're vain, forget it. When I look at myself in the mirror in my Beyoncé outfit or whatever, the question is, 'Is it funny? Yeah. We'll do it.' If you start being vain about it, you'll lose the audience."
 
And there's nothing Elaine C Smith likes more than keeping an audience on side. "I said to Alex Norton a few years ago, 'Do you think I'm psychotic?' He said, 'Why?' I'd walked on to the stage of the King's and the theatre was empty and I said, 'Because I feel more at home here than I do in the rehearsal room.'"
• Jack And The Beanstalk is at His Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen, until 7 January;
• I Dreamed A Dream is at His Majesty's Theatre, 3-7 April and Eden Court, Inverness, 11-16 June

© Mark Fisher, 2011

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Cinderella, Dundee Rep, theatre review

Published in the Guardian
Three stars

CINDERELLA? You know, the one set on a boat with a bunch of retired magicians living on the top deck. They're a bit like the old folk in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; cute, mischievous and wise. Young Cinderella, who does all the work in their floating retirement home, is forever being teased by them.
 
Ring any bells? Me neither. But that's the setting for Phil Porter's unorthodox version of the fairytale, first seen at London's Unicorn. It's one that tries to sharpen up the familiar archetypes with a dash of psychological realism.
 
Kirsty Mackay's big-hearted Cinderella, who with real-life conjurers on board has no need of a fairy godmother, is less constrained by her stepsisters than by her desire to do her late mother proud. Meanwhile, Kevin Lennon's charming Prince Daniel, who is really an orphan from the Butterfly Republic, is searching for a girl who'll just be honest with him.
 
It's intriguing stuff but, in diverging from the formula, Porter loses some of the tale's elemental force. The extra detail distracts us from the urgency of the plot. 

At the same time, the play gets stuck between the narrative richness of a Christmas show and the broad brushstrokes of panto, and ends up as not quite either. The ugly sisters, for example, look set to provide some knockabout comedy, but that's not possible after Natalie Wallace's Tixylix attributes her ill-treatment of Cinderella to her own experience of being bullied. This is psychologically credible, but narratively disruptive.
 
Neil Warmington's two-tier revolving set asks a lot of the actors, who have too little time to change costumes. But James Brining's production is full of vigour, and, at the end, it comes ashore with a romantic union that is touching, deserved and no longer all at sea.


© Mark Fisher, 2011 (pic: Douglas McBride)

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Jackie and the Beanstalk, theatre review

Published in the Guardian
MacRobert, Stirling
Four stars


IF anyone still thinks panto is a throwback to a misogynist past, they need to take a look at the MacRobert's glorious giant-slaying romp. Here, the fairytale is fuelled by a fiery female energy, with self-styled "panto-feminist" Jackie helping unmask a Wizard of Oz-style baddie who is little more than a boy with a broken heart. However ridiculous the women look, they are never so inadequate as the men.
 
Played by Helen McAlpine, this Jackie can sing and dance like the best of them, but she's determined to grow up into her own woman, unlike her soppy sister Jilly, played by Natalie Toyne, who can't wait to become the romantic lead. Jackie's path to independence looks assured, until her prepubescent suspicion of sex is upturned by a sudden lust for her sister's boyfriend, Billy Bisto.
 
The tug-of-love Billy (Paul James Corrigan) would rather shed his baddie persona and become a Buttons-style heart-throb in the manner of the late panto legend Gerard Kelly.

In other words, none of these characters is comfortable in the stock roles they have been given. 

Even Jilly, with her overeagerness to burst into insipid song, is too quirky to be a conventional leading lady, while Jo Freer has an uncommon gutsiness as Fairy Mary Christmas, as likely to tamper disastrously with the plot as to sort things out with a wave of her magic wand.
 
At the raucous heart of this joyful show is Dot Von Trott, the one figure who's happy in her own skin (frequently, quite a lot of skin). Played by honorary woman Johnny McKnight, writer, director and star, this dame is a delirious lord of misrule. She is rude, waspish and funny, absolutely in her element in our austerity economy, and able to make you feel as if you are the only girl in the world.

© Mark Fisher, 2011 (Pic: Douglas McBride)

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Panto and Christmas show preview

DECEMBER is the busiest month in the theatre calendar, as everyone from community groups to the National Theatre of Scotland adds their bit of festive cheer. Sweets will be thrown and baddies will be booed, but there's a good deal more than that going on. Here is how the land lies this season.
 
Traditional
If you like 'em lavish, large-scale and raucous, then Glasgow is your city. Here, at any rate, is where the battle for the panto pound is at its most intense. Taking pride of place is Sleeping Beauty at the King's (2 Dec-8 Jan), which is fielding a terribly tempting line-up of Karen Dunbar, Clare Grogan and Tony Roper. Expect strong support too from Steven McNicoll and Kath Howden as the king and queen.

Competition - or "compemetition", as the late Gerard Kelly used to have it - comes from the SECC, new kid on the panto block, which is reuniting last year's successful partnership of John Barrowman and the Krankies for Robinson Crusoe And The Caribbean Pirates (17 Dec-7 Jan). Whatever your memories of the Krankies from 1980s TV, you have to see them live to appreciate their fan-dabi-dozi appeal.
 
Over at the Pavilion, former stomping ground of the Krankies, you can expect an extra helping of rough and tumble as Jim Davidson takes on the role of Captain Hook in The Magical Adventures Of Peter Pan (30 Nov-21 Jan).
 
You'll find similar spectaculars all over the place, prime among them being Jack And The Beanstalk at His Majesty's, Aberdeen (3 Dec-7 Jan) with Elaine C Smith starring as Fairy Flora McDonald, and Cinderella at the King's, Edinburgh (3 Dec-22 Jan), starring firm favourites Allan Stewart, Andy Gray and Grant Stott.
 
Alternative
It's hard to satirise a form that revels in its own ridiculousness, but there are a handful of shows that add an extra level of irony. Sitting closest to the borderline between the traditional and the subversive is Jackie And The Beanstalk at the MacRobert, Stirling (until 7 Jan), the latest caper written, directed and starring Johnny McKnight. Known for his work with Random Accomplice, McKnight plays Dame Dot Von Trott who, with her two daughters, has to reunite the pantosphere with its stolen Christmas spirit.
 
The template for McKnight's alternative spin on the traditional panto was set out at Glasgow's Tron which, this year, is revisiting Mister Merlin: A Pure Magic Panto (2-31 Dec). Last seen at the Tron in 1989 under the title of Peter And Penny's Panto, Alex Norton's rewritten show is about two puppets who have to retrieve Merlin's stolen magic. The top-notch cast is led by Jimmy Chisholm, who was also in the 1989 production.
 
There are likely to be similar levels of irreverence in Scrooge: The Panto at the relaunched Cottiers in Glasgow (7-31 Dec). Set in a modern-day pawn shop, it promises "music, singing and some very basic dancing". Alternatively, if you can dedicate no more than a lunch hour to the panto form, your only option will be Snow White And The Seventh Dwarf, the seasonal offering at A Play, a Pie and a Pint (Òran Mór, Glasgow, 5-24 Dec). Expect a fun-filled, no-budget romp by Dave Anderson and David MacLennan about Snow White's little-known relationship with her favourite dwarf.
 
Bijou
Perhaps you want something of the magic of a traditional panto but could do without so much of the clamour of the big city-centre shows. If so, you shouldn't have to travel far to find what you're after. At Perth Theatre, for example, Jack And The Beanstalk (9 Dec-7 Jan) by Alan McHugh (whose work can also be seen in Glasgow and Aberdeen) drafts in local youngsters to join a cast of professionals including Sandy Batchelor as Jack, Anne Kidd as the queen and Peter Kelly as the king.
 
At Musselburgh's Brunton, writer and director Liam Rudden is back, turning his attentions to Aladdin (29 Nov-7 Jan), cramming it with local jokes and bringing in 25 young East Lothian performers to help Widow Twankey and Wishee Washee defeat the evil Abanazar. From Kirkcaldy to Cumbernauld, Motherwell to St Andrews, the same kind of merriment is going on.
 
More local still is Snow White And The Seven Leithers (19-23 Dec), a panto set in Leithuania by Leith Community Theatre at the South Leith Parish Hall.
Look out too for youth theatre shows, which have their own special energy. Edinburgh's Strangetown is fielding an impressive set of five all-new shows, including Alan Gordon's Snow White And The Seven Delinquents and Dunan Kidd's Beauty And The Beast, at the Scottish Storytelling Centre (8-11 Dec). 

Meanwhile, at Aberdeen's Lemon Tree, Scottish Youth Theatre is performing Jack And The Magic Beans (5-24 Dec).
 
Christmas spirit
After shouting yourself hoarse with your cries of "He's behind you", you could be ready for something a little more sedate. Christmas shows recognise the appetite for seasonal entertainment but prefer rich storytelling to stock plots. This year, the National Theatre of Scotland is entering the December fray for the first time with an intimate retelling of A Christmas Carol at Film City in Govan Town Hall (30 Nov-31 Dec). Director Graham McLaren is giving the Dickens story a particularly spooky staging that makes use of sinister life-size puppets alongside the cast of five. For another take on the same story, you can check out Tommy Steele in the musical Scrooge at Glasgow's Theatre Royal (28 Nov-3 Dec).
 
Several of the major rep theatres head in the same direction. Whether it's Phil Porter's Cinderella at Dundee Rep (29 Nov-31 Dec), Stuart Paterson's Beauty And The Beast at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (25 Nov-31 Dec) or Alan McHugh's Hansel And Gretel at the Citizens, Glasgow (3 Dec-7 Jan), these shows draw on the archetypal power of the classic fairytale to provide satisfying drama.
 
Introducing a brand new tale, writer-director Jonathan Stone takes us on Sergeant Cracker's Christmas Quest at the Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline (30 Nov-26 Dec). This competition among the baubles to get to the top of the Christmas tree promises audience participation and elements of pantomime, but also deeper themes about tradition versus modernity and the acceptance of getting older.
 
Younger audiences
Thanks to the pioneering work of Scottish theatre companies such as Starcatchers, there is a growing market for shows aimed at the very young. Stirling's MacRobert has a great record for this kind of work and this year is fielding two productions for tots. Polar Molar (29 Nov-31 Dec) is an icy tale for the over-threes about Captain Scot Scott's mission to find the world's last polar bear, while Too Many Penguins? (7-24 Dec) is a hands-on chance for the under-threes to discover how many penguins can squeeze into a tiny space.
 
Other shows aimed at a similar audience include The Night After Christmas, in which two elves prepare a feast for the hard-working Father Christmas, at Glasgow's Tron (3-23 Dec); Rudolph, a CATS-nominated show about trying to fit in, at Glasgow's Arches (2 Dec-3 Jan); Little Ulla, an interactive show about a mountain goat, at Glasgow's Citizens (10 Dec-7 Jan); and The Lost Sock Princess, about what happens to the partners of all those odd socks in your drawer, by Puppet Lab at Edinburgh's Traverse (14-23 Dec).
 
At Edinburgh's Scottish Storytelling Centre there are a couple of festive events based on Diana Hendry's The Very Snowy Christmas. First, the author herself reads a selection of her tales (16 Dec), then Blunderbus Theatre Company presents a staged version (23-24 Dec) of the story of Little Mouse learning about snow.
 
Dance
For a subtle take on a traditional fairytale, there is Scottish Ballet's The Sleeping Beauty, which opens at Glasgow's Theatre Royal (17-31 Dec) before dates in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Inverness in January. Ashley Page's production, set to a live performance of Tchaikovsky's score, was first seen to acclaim in 2008 and features stunning designs by Antony McDonald that take us from 19th-century Russia to 20th-century London.
 
Unseasonal
For those who say, "Bah, humbug," to all this festive cheer, but who still fancy a good night out, Edinburgh has three tinsel-free options. First is The Tree Of Knowledge, a new play by Jo Clifford at the Traverse (8-24 Dec) in which David Hume and Adam Smith find themselves catapulted into the 21st century and are dismayed to see how their ideas have been put into practice. Gerry Mulgrew, Neil McKinven and Joanna Tope star in Ben Harrison's production.

After that, your choice is between the pomp of The King And I, the classic Rogers and Hammerstein musical, at the Festival Theatre (14 Dec-7 Jan) and the bombast of We Will Rock You, Ben Elton's tribute to the music of Queen, at the Playhouse (29 Nov-7 Jan). Whether these are pantomimes in all but name is for you to decide

© Mark Fisher, 2011

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