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Published in the Guardian
Citizens, Glasgow/Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh co-production
Three stars
WE'RE in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest territory
– but instead of Jack Nicholson finding method in the madness, here we
have Eddie, a hospital radio DJ, discovering the insanity of the
psychiatric system.
Like Ken Kesey's book, Donna Franceschild's bittersweet comedy, based on her own 1994 TV series,
stands as a metaphor for authoritarian oppression. When the self-styled
Ready Eddie: the Soul Survivor starts playing his treasured collection
of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke originals at St Jude's
psychiatric hospital, he realises the main obstacle in his path is not
anyone's bipolar disorder, OCD or schizophrenia, but the psychopathic
control of the institution.
Every chance the residents get for
therapeutic self-help – be it petting kittens, cleaning windows or
letting their voice be heard on the station – is quashed by a system
more concerned with budgets, health-and-safety rules and bureaucratic
efficiencies. Takin' Over the Asylum doesn't have the revolutionary
fervour of Cuckoo's Nest, but its heart is in the same place.
More
touchingly, it illustrates the fragility of the human psyche.
Franceschild shows how much behaviour is explicable in social as well as
medical terms. Like the alcoholism of the supposedly sane DJ, the
patients' self-harming and obsessive cleaning are symptoms of life
experiences. Behind Franceschild's brash, confrontational jokes is a
plea for understanding of the damage done by circumstance.
If
there's a weakness, it's that the stakes rarely feel high enough. The
show is funny and sad, but the story fights shy of the extremes of
comedy and tragedy. Mark Thomson's Citz/Lyceum co-production, however,
is blessed with a strong ensemble cast, including lively performances
from Iain Robertson as the downtrodden DJ and Brian Vernel as his
hyperactive sidekick Campbell.
© Mark Fisher, 2013
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Published in the Guardian
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Three stars
YOU couldn't fault this adaptation of Julia Donaldson's
novel for being short of themes. In 90 minutes, it ticks off
bereavement, child abuse, missing people, drug addiction, mental
illness, multiculturalism and the search for identity. Throw in a
cat-and-mouse chase across the country, and you have the kind of
sensationalist narrative that plays well to the target teenage audience.
Katie Posner's production, in this Tron/Pilot collaboration, is
at its best when the stakes are high and Jessica Henwick's beautiful
Leonora Watts-Chan, a 15-year-old runaway, struggles to know which way
to turn. After being orphaned, she has fled the home of her predatory
uncle in Bristol to go in search of an estranged Chinese grandfather in
Glasgow. With tremendous physical presence, Henwick captures the sense
of adolescent righteousness, passion and confusion of a girl trying to
create order in an unfair universe.
For as long as the show
focuses on her dilemma, it remains gripping. Things get uneven when
Donaldson's other themes take over, particularly when Leonora falls into
an odd netherworld of well-meaning but erratic psychiatric
out-patients.
Stuck awkwardly between comedy and tragedy, these
scenes are a distraction – largely because the story is not about mental
illness. As with the other themes, it is an idea appended to the
narrative and not fundamental to it; more like a topic for classroom
discussion than a dramatic device. The same is true of the abusive
uncle. He functions as a symbol of an unreliable adult word, but is too
sketchily portrayed to be more than a gratuitous bogeyman.
What
the story is really about – Leonora and her Little Red Riding Hood
journey of self-discovery – is obscured by the extraneous material from
the novel. It is a weakness compounded by the unresolved ending, one
that lessens the impact of the excitement that has preceded it.
© Mark Fisher, 2013
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Published in the Guardian
Birds of Paradise
Two stars
HALF an hour along the Clyde from Glasgow, the Beacon is a handsome new arts centre
with a 500-seat main auditorium and a 100-seat studio. The artistic
director of the £9.5m waterfront complex is Julie Ellen who, by a happy
accident, is also the director of this opening production by the touring
company Birds of Paradise. With its all-white set by Kenny Miller and
abstract video projections by Neil Bettles, it shows off the studio to
good effect.Unfortunately, Danny Start's script is rarely as interesting
as the story that inspired it.
It is about Albert Quinn, a 50-year-old hardman who, like Start's real-life friend Tommy McHugh,
has suffered a double brain aneurysm. When he comes round after the
long operation, he has an irresistible urge to paint, sculpt and write.
This rare "sudden artistic output" syndrome turns a semi-criminal drug
user into a compulsive creator at large "in an alien landscape".
As
a neurological phenomenon, this is fascinating. As a piece of drama, it
has nowhere to go. Once we have established Quinn has woken up a new
man, then what?
Start's solution is to go backwards. In the lead
role, Paul Cunningham exists in a world of fragmented memory. His head
buzzes with voices – father, wife, fellow patient and alter-ego – and
with each fractured scene, Quinn shows us the past that he is leaving
behind. Theatre, however, is a present-tense medium and none of this
reflection moves the story forward.
Morag Stark, David Toole and
Cunningham give spirited performances, but the things that interest us
most (the man adjusting to a new personality, the outpouring of
creativity) are the things we see least.
© Mark Fisher, 2013
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This morning the Byre Theatre, St Andrews, announced it was closing because of the danger of becoming insolvent. Here's the official statement.
As a reminder of what we are losing, I dug out this article I wrote for the Herald in 1997:
LAST week I took a peak into the Byre
Theatre auditorium for the last time. Never again will I see that narrow oblong
room, the audience occupying little more space than the stage, in a building
hidden away on a footpath off the main road, like some clandestine meeting
house for the artistically deprived.
Thanks to a £3,385,000 lottery award, the
biggest of its kind in Scotland, the St Andrews theatre is being demolished,
and a completely new building going up in its place. The bulldozers are
expected to arrive at the start of August. Next time a member of the public
gets inside the town's only professional theatre space, it will be the autumn
of 1999, when the old 174-seat auditorium will have been replaced by a
220-seater with back-stage facilities previously only dreamed of.
It's the most ambitious of the various
lottery-funded projects taking place around the country at the moment. Many
theatres are upgrading their dressing rooms, re-upholstering their seats, or
sprucing up their box offices, but to go as far as starting again from scratch
is something else.
It's certainly an unimaginable leap from
the theatre's first incarnation in a former cow-shed, rented for £10 a year in
1933. The actress Una McLean got her first job there in 1954, and remembers having
to climb out of the dressing room down a ladder to get onto the stage. If she
took her exit on the opposite side, she had to go out into the yard and back up
a steel staircase. "You had to exit prompt side in all kinds of
weathers," she recalls. "You'd be out in the pouring rain, and having
to go up the staircase to come back on the other side."
That building was vacated in 1970 to make
way for a new purpose-built theatre on the same site. Sadly, they lost the
notice saying "Please keep your feet off the stage," in the process.
Happily, leg room was no longer a problem. The new theatre served the company
well, but after 25 years the roof was leaking, the heating malfunctioning,
access was poor for disabled people, and there was little hope of it surviving
into the next millennium.
When artistic director Ken Alexander
returns at the end of his itinerant season in two years' time, he will find
vastly improved facilities. No longer will passers-by on Abbey Street be faced
by an unwelcoming concrete facade showing no signs of life. Instead they'll see
a long, airy foyer running along the north side of the building, leading to a
first-floor restaurant and second-floor box office.
The architects, Nicoll Russell Studios, who
also worked on Dundee Rep, have aimed to retain the intimacy that has
characterised the Byre throughout its history, increasing the audience capacity
only to 220. Backstage, there'll be major improvements, with the introduction
of a fly-tower, a full-size scenery dock twice as big as the stage, and
substantial wing space on both sides of the stage. The increased playing space
will allow the theatre to present dance for the first time.
"Actors and audience are all agreed
that the thing that works about the Byre is the intimacy between the stage and
the auditorium," says Ken Alexander. "You can get away with smaller
and more intricate detail in this space. The new theatre will have a similar
relationship, although it encircles slightly more."
Additionally, there will be a studio space
which will be used for rehearsals, workshops and meetings of the busy Byre
Writers' Group. Changing rooms, administration offices and workshops will be
positioned together, somewhere above where the cafe used to be. The house next
door to the theatre is being demolished, giving the architects a third more
ground space to play with.
 At the moment, the company is able to skimp
by with four full-time staff, but there'll be no such economies with a big new
building to run. The plan is that some costs will be offset against increased
revenue from the bar and restaurant, but the experience of other theatres
suggests that benefits and expenditure are impossible to estimate accurately.
"Costs are likely to increase because we've got a more interesting space
to work with, with more possibilities," says Alexander. "The Scottish
Arts Council recognises that increased costs will be an issue, but it's making
no promises."
The director does not regard the project
simply in terms of bricks and mortar. He sees it as a chance to develop his
programme, reach new audiences, and make artistic connections previously denied
to him. He's treating this homeless period as a chance to spread the Byre's
name abroad, taking the forthcoming Worzel Gummidge to Kirkcaldy after St
Andrews, premiering Jan Nathanson's Californian Poppy on the Edinburgh Fringe,
and initiating a community touring policy that will continue even after the new
building is opened.
Once back in Abbey Street, he aims to cater
to a range of audiences - not only the holiday-makers who account for up to 70
per cent of his summer trade, and not only the typical subscription audience.
Like many a disciple of the late Joan Knight, Alexander is a populist to the
last, and he makes no apologies for giving people what they want.
"You can programme in an exciting
manner and be popular too," he says, already commissioning writers with a
view to increasing the national stock of popular plays. "Rather than just
doing a summer season, as we have done in recent years, we will be able to
extend the programme of our own work, and have a greater ability to attract
touring work. The potential at St Andrews is great because you've got three
distinct audiences - tourists, students and local residents. In terms of the
programme we'll be aiming to get as diverse an audience as possible. We'll have
more flexibility in the spaces we can use, and therefore the range of
activities we can programme. I hope we'll have the stability to programme
Whistle Down the Wind one week, and Trainspotting the next."
Published in the Scotsman
FOR two dozen Edinburgh residents, 2013 began with a
theatrical pilgrimage. Spurred into action by Scotsman theatre critic
Joyce McMillan, they gathered in the city’s Cambridge Street on the
evening of 2 January to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Traverse
Theatre. From there, this impromptu gathering walked back in time;
first to the Grassmarket, where the theatre was resident in the 1970s
and 80s, and then to James Court off the Lawnmarket, where the company
launched in 1963 with Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos and Fernando
Arrabal’s Orisons.
The party included current artistic director
Orla O’Loughlin, plus folk who’d worked at the theatre or simply enjoyed
the company’s work. On the way, they traded stories about late-night
sessions in the bar, narrowly-won battles with the funding bodies, and
the occasion, on the second ever performance, when actor Colette O’Neil
was stabbed on stage with a paper knife, leading to an emergency dash to
hospital and some fantastic publicity for the new-born theatre.
They
talked also about the plays they had seen in a theatre which, after its
initial explosion of European avant-garde energy, became known as
Scotland’s home of new writing. In the history of 20th century British
theatre, only London’s Royal Court can compare in its sustained
commitment to showcasing the work of living playwrights.
What,
then, is the legacy of this theatre? This week, the Traverse will kick
off a year of 50th anniversary events with a rehearsed reading of
500-word scripts by 50 playwrights. The majority of these writers,
whittled down from 630 applicants, are unfamiliar names and there’s a
chance that among them are the playwrights who will shape the story of
the theatre’s next 50 years.
It’s hard to think of a
professional playwright in Scotland who has not had an association with
the theatre. The few exceptions are those who have been intimately
involved with their own companies: Robert David MacDonald at Glasgow’s
Citizens, John McGrath with 7:84 and today, perhaps, David Leddy with
Fire Exit.
To assess the theatre’s impact, let’s start with the
two most internationally successful Scottish plays of the past decade.
We should be clear that the Traverse was not responsible for David
Harrower’s Blackbird (that was the Edinburgh International Festival in
2005) nor Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (that was the National Theatre of
Scotland in 2006) but, crucially, it was the Traverse that gave both
writers their first break. In fact, if it weren’t for Blackbird and
Black Watch, we’d probably still be saying Scotland’s biggest theatrical
exports were Harrower’s Knives In Hens and Burke’s Gagarin Way, both of
which premiered at the Traverse before being produced scores of times
abroad.
Those two debut plays say a lot about the theatre’s
approach. On paper and in performance, there is almost nothing to
connect them. Knives In Hens is a subtle study of a primitive community
that seems to live in fear of language itself. It is sober and
mysterious. Gagarin Way, by contrast, is a hilarious heist comedy that
takes its name from a street in the communist stronghold of Lumphinnans
in Fife. It is abrasive and polemical. Both plays worked because they
were true expressions of the playwrights’ sensibilities. They hadn’t
been written to order or knocked into some predetermined house style.
The Traverse trusted the writers’ instincts and audiences welcomed their
distinctive voices.
Often, writers have gone on to higher profile
(and better paid) work after a Traverse hit. Stephen Greenhorn’s
Passing Places, a “road movie for the stage”, was directed by John
Tiffany in 1997, before the writer invented River City, scripted
episodes of Doctor Who and Marchlands, and wrote the Proclaimers musical
Sunshine On Leith (soon to be a movie). Likewise, Simon Donald acted in
many shows in the Grassmarket era and, with The Life Of Stuff, wrote
one of the first hits of the Cambridge Street era. After this black
comedy of drug-fuelled excess, he wrote the feature film Beautiful
Creatures starring Rachel Weisz, the TV movie Low Winter Sun, plus
various episodes of Dr Finlay, Murphy’s Law and Wallander.
But the
Traverse is much more than a jumping off point. It is prestigious in
its own right and a place where playwrights at any stage in their career
want to be seen. A case in point is John Byrne, who was given a boost
by the success of The Slab Boys in 1978 in a production starring the
young Robbie Coltrane. He went on to write Tutti Frutti and Your
Cheatin’ Heart in parallel to his work as a visual artist, but he was
still happy to return to the Traverse in 2008 with Nova Scotia, the
fourth part of his “trilogy”.
It was a similar story for Liz
Lochhead, who wrote her first full-length play, Blood And Ice, for the
Traverse in 1982 and returned in triumph with Perfect Days, starring
Siobhan Redmond, in 1998. Jo Clifford and Chris Hannan also had plays
staged at the Traverse when they were starting out in the 1980s and
returned more recently with, respectively, The Tree Of Knowledge and The
Three Musketeers And The Princess of Spain (winner of a CATS best new
play award).
Other writers, such as Iain Heggie and Zinnie
Harris, have come to the Traverse after building their reputations
elsewhere; others still, such as Linda McLean, just can’t stop coming
back. In this, the prolific David Greig leads the field. His Traverse CV
includes Europe, The Architect, The Speculator, Outlying Islands, Danny
306 + Me (4 Ever), When The Bulbul Stopped Singing, Damascus and
Midsummer, as well as various early-morning Fringe shows. With patience,
we’ll find out which of the Traverse 50 writers is equal to matching
that tally.
• 50 Plays for Edinburgh, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Friday and Saturday. www.traverse.co.uk
© Mark Fisher, 2013
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Published in the Guardian
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Four stars
THERE is much that is extraordinary about Shelagh Delaney's
debut play: that it was written by an 18-year-old after watching
something by Terence Rattigan and thinking she could do better; that
instead of making an issue of single motherhood, interracial sex,
teenage pregnancy and homosexuality, it presents them as part of life's
tapestry; that, in its unsentimental representation of a working-class
Salford experience, it became year zero for everything from Coronation
Street to the Smiths.
Even
its imperfections add to its energy. The story favours slice-of-life
realism over narrative neatness, so characters come and go with no
regard to the resolution of a well-made play. All this means that A
Taste of Honey goes on a bit, meandering to its ambivalent conclusion,
but you might also argue that's the point. School-leaver Jo has never
had control over her life, and that is exemplified by the random
departures of her mother, lover and best friend.
What seems most
extraordinary of all, especially in Tony Cownie's production, is the
vivid intensity of Delaney's two central characters. When Rebecca Ryan's
Jo and Lucy Black as her mother, Helen, are on stage together, they are
as ruthless – and as alive – as George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Showing a deep feel for the dialect's rhythm and pace, they fire out
the language with machine-gun ferocity. Their exchanges are cruel,
unyielding and bleakly funny, but the viciousness is also their bond.
Delaney
shows, quite brilliantly, that the more Jo rebels against her wayward
mother, the more she becomes like her. As the play goes on, the dry wit
and hard-as-nails philosophy that makes her a catch as a young lover
transforms into a much less attractive cynicism and selfishness. Delaney
tells it like it is, and Ryan and Black show how even the most
startling life-force can be warped by fear, defensiveness and
circumstance.
© Mark Fisher, 2013
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Published in the Guardian
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Two stars
THE class war isn't over yet. Just ask the House of Commons catering staff whom MP Christopher Chope referred to as "servants" last week.
Let's hope they don't react like the sisters in Jean Genet's The Maids,
so damaged by the social pecking order that they spend half their time
plotting to murder their mistress, and the other half indulging in cruel
master-servant role‑playing fantasies.
In this all-male production, director Stewart Laing makes the
connection between Genet's outsider status and the rock'n'roll spirit he
inspired. It begins with actors Samuel Keefe, Ross Mann and Scott Reid
getting out electric guitars for a stately rendition of Metallica's One.
They intersperse subsequent scenes with Venus in Furs and The Man Who
Sold the World. Elsewhere, there are references to Nirvana and Take
That, and the show ends with a massive pin-up of the actors in boyband
pose.
What's disappointing is the lack of rock'n'roll dynamics in
the performances themselves. Laing reminds us that Genet paved the
way for the danger of the Velvet Underground, the shape-shifting
charisma of David Bowie and the histrionics of Metallica, yet his actors
show none of those qualities. Worse, they make a simple story hard to
follow, owing to their monotone delivery.
This is a shame because
there's lots to love about Laing's production. His decision to avoid
camp should, in theory, have given the play a pansexual ambiguity. This
is the theatre where the flamboyant Lindsay Kemp,
mentor to Bowie, staged the play in 1971, but Laing's version is free
of drag-queen flouncing. Though it's not clear what has replaced it, the
show offers many entertaining surprises such as the clip of a Genet interview
and, midway through, a question-and-answer session with the director.
If only the bold production ideas were equalled by the performances.
© Mark Fisher, 2013 (Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
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Published in the Scotsman
Preview of The Maids, Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
STEWART Laing is sitting at the long table that fills the room where
his company, Untitled Projects, is based. It’s the former design studio
of Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre and one of the brightest office spaces in
the building.
In theory, this is a rehearsal break for him and he
should be able to relax, but there’s no escaping his work. From an
adjacent room comes the distinctive riff of David Bowie’s The Man Who
Sold the World. Then it comes again. And again.
It’s the sound of
Laing’s actors trying to master rock guitar. With help from guitar tutor
Scott Paterson, formerly of Sons and Daughters, they are also getting
their fingers round Metallica’s One and the Velvet Underground’s Venus
in Furs. The reason is typically unexpected. Laing is staging Jean
Genet’s The Maids, a cross-dressed tale of power, role-playing and
identity, and he reckons it has an untapped rock’n’roll energy just
waiting to get out.
“There are lots of connections between Jean
Genet and rock music,” he says. “He was so influential in the 1950s with
the whole idea of an underground culture being more interesting than
the main culture.”
The 1946 play pre-dates the rock era, but it
has impeccable rock credentials. Proto-punk singer Patti Smith has taken
to staging gigs on Genet’s birthday because she doesn’t believe the
writer and political activist was sufficiently recognised in his
lifetime.
“In the 1950s it was said that those who aspired to be
Beat read Kerouac, but that the real Beats read Genet,” she wrote in
Details magazine. On one occasion, she was joined by REM’s Michael Stipe
who performed an acoustic version of David Bowie’s Jean Genie, the
title a pun on Genet’s name. Bowie, meanwhile, learned his androgynous
Ziggy Stardust moves from choreographer and mime artist Lindsay Kemp,
who himself directed The Maids at the Citizens’ Close Theatre in 1971.
It’s
something of this iconoclastic spirit Laing hopes to capture now.
“Genet didn’t like a pure psychological reading of his plays,” he says.
“And he didn’t like pure political readings either. He thought something
magical happened in theatre when it was good. A lot of actors expect
the entire conversation to be about psychology, but I think it’s more
interesting to add other stuff in there. Having guitars in the show has
got nothing to do with psychology.”
Working with three young
actors who are students or recent graduates of the Royal Conservatoire
of Scotland, he is following Genet’s wishes by casting men in the female
roles. The play is loosely based on the 1933 case of servants Christine
and Léa Papin who murdered their mistress and her daughter. In Genet’s
hands, it becomes a strange story of class warfare and sadomasochistic
power games, made more ambiguous by the cross-dressing.
“Genet
grew up in all-male environments,” says Laing. “He was in orphanages and
then he was in borstals and then prisons. The female figures in his
life were people pretending to be women, like the feminine figures in
prison who are fulfilling the role of the female. The play was written
in the middle of the Second World War when those ideas of masculine and
feminine were much more clearly defined than they are now. I was
interested in looking at it in the early 21st century where there’s a
much more fluid crossover between masculine and feminine behaviour.”
Rock
music adds its own gender associations: “As well as a Bowie song, they
also play a Metallica song, which is completely testosterone-fuelled.
I’m wondering what the association is if you put those two things
together.”
It’s a surprise it has taken this long for Laing to get
round to Genet. A designer turned director, he has been steadily
working his way through a long list of French writers including Rimbaud,
Cocteau, Proust, Marivaux, Foucault and Guibert. Where this Francophile
fascination comes from, he finds it hard to say; his mastery of the
language means he can get by in a restaurant, but no more than that, yet
he is repeatedly drawn back to this countercultural work. “I’d really
love to do Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Marie Koltès at some point.”
His
most audacious show to date also took influence from France. First seen
at Edinburgh’s Traverse in 2011, The Salon Project was a remarkable
performance in which the audience was professionally fitted out in the
clothes of a 19th-century Parisian salon before partaking in a series of
talks and performances. The stiff formality of the clothes seemed to
change the audience’s attitude, as if we really had stepped back to a
more sober, intellectually probing time. It was a complex,
labour-intensive event to stage, and the great news is it’s coming back.
As well as dates at London’s Barbican, it will have an eight-day run at
the Citizens’ in March.
“Even though I was in there throughout
every performance, it often wasn’t until afterwards that somebody would
say, ‘This amazing conversation happened over in the corner, were you
aware of that?’ – and I was completely unaware of many things that were
going on. It’s exciting thinking we’ve got another 18 performances and
every one of them is going to be very different.”
Both The Salon
Project and The Maids are examples of the way Laing likes to push at the
definition of what theatre can be. Fifteen years ago, in Myths of the
Near Future, he staged three stories by JG Ballard in unusual spaces,
including a disused swimming pool in Govan. More recently, in Pamela
Carter’s Slope, he positioned the audience above the actors, who
performed in a fully plumbed Victorian bathroom below. It’s an approach
that means every production is an experiment – a big “what if?” – and he
hopes the audience will approach it in the same spirit of adventure.
“I’m
unsure what the outcome is, but I would hope that if the audience have
had an interesting experience, they’re not going to be dissatisfied,” he
says. “Douglas Gordon says the reason to make art is to have a
conversation and I profoundly believe that.”
• The Maids is at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow, today until 2 February. The Salon Project is at the same venue, 15–23 March. www.citz.co.uk
© Mark Fisher, 2013 (Pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
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Published in the Guardian
Traverse Theatre
Three stars
IN THE bar at the Traverse, there's a blackboard where the audience
can vote on whether they believe in the afterlife or not. At my last
count, the sceptics had the majority. But, even as an atheist, you feel a
bit of a spoilsport for chalking up your belief that this is as good as
it gets.
There's a similar sense of ambivalence inside the theatre,
where artistic director Orla O'Loughlin has drafted in touring company Peepolykus
to consider the strange case of Arthur Conan Doyle. On the one hand,
the Edinburgh-born author invented one of fiction's greatest rational
minds in the shape of Sherlock Holmes;
on the other, he was a Christian spiritualist who wrote a credulous
book called The Coming of the Fairies. Harry Houdini called him "a
wonderful but gently gullible man".
In Peepolykus's spin on this
theme, a PhD philosophy student called Jennifer McGeary (a suitably
earnest Gabriel Quigley) tries to deliver an illustrated lecture
entitled "Why Do We Continue to Believe in the Afterlife?", yet
repeatedly undermines her own scepticism by attempting to communicate
with her dead grandmother. Meanwhile, the two actors she has hired for
the occasion – Peepolykus mainstays Javier Marzan and John Nicholson –
try not to be spooked by the flickering lights, mysterious bumps and
magical illusions.
In the vain hope of one day staging The
Complete Works of Sherlock Holmes, Marzan and Nicholson insist on acting
out scenes from The Reichenbach Falls and The Hound of the Baskervilles
to demonstrate McGeary's points. As genuine historical research gets
muddled with knockabout comedy, the show takes on the chaotic air of a Peter Glaze sketch
from Crackerjack. At times, it is very funny, but at other times, only
mildly amusing, meaning the show never quite finds the level of comic
delirium – or post-Enlightenment debate – to make it compelling.
© Mark Fisher, 2012
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Published in the Guardian
Dundee Rep
Four stars
AT this time of year, even the more sober-minded shows play to the
gallery with fart gags and slapstick. The distinguishing characteristic
of Jemima Levick's production of The Snow Queen, by contrast, is just
how seriously it takes the classic tale. Her staging has warmth and
humour but, as any child in the audience will tell you, the stakes are
too high to waste time clowning around.
This is especially true in Mike Kenny's adaptation, which is attuned to the dark transformative power of Hans Christian Andersen's
story. He understands the mysterious horror of Kai changing overnight
from sweet young boy to bolshie adolescent after a shard of broken
mirror enters his heart. He understands the importance of the setting – a
world in icy deadlock, heartless and cruel, where the Snow Queen
symbolises the frightening allure of adult sexuality, and her kiss sends
a ripple of dull colour across the sky. He understands, too, the
bittersweet moral that life does not stand still, winter turns to
spring, children become grownups and friendship turns into love.
He
is also sensitive to the way fairytales enlist animals to help the
young heroine. Ann Louise Ross exudes wisdom and hope as she morphs from
grandmother to snowman, sunflower, crow and penguin, guiding Gerda on
her journey to rescue Kai. Played by Molly Vevers, Gerda is wholesome,
vulnerable and determined, and we never doubt the danger and importance
of her task.
As Emily Winter's creepily seductive Snow Queen
pounds the stage on stilts, leaving Martin McBride's Kai mesmerised, we
are so gripped by the adventure that the merry, Slava's Snowshow-style finale almost seems like a distraction.
© Mark Fisher, 2012 (pic: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)
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Published in the Guardian
Citizens Theatre
Three stars
AS pantos across the land ramp up the contrast, volume and colour, the Christmas
show at the Citz is refreshingly austere. Against a backdrop of naked
winter trees, this Sleeping Beauty plays out in a nightmarish,
monochrome landscape, the half-light alleviated by no more than a flash
of gold or a blood-red dress.
It's a bleak world, somewhere between Samuel Beckett and Tim Burton,
a place where the Prince (Owen Whitelaw) and Beauty (Lucy Hollis)
have to battle with uncommon ferocity to achieve their liberation. In
its simplest form, Sleeping Beauty is a metaphor for the passage from
childhood to maturity. The Prince awakens Beauty into adulthood and
effectively frees her from parental authority. But in Rufus Norris's adaptation of Charles Perrault's original, the end of Beauty's 100-year sleep is merely the beginning of a long struggle towards release and renewal.
This
becomes a parable about the failure of an older generation to
relinquish control over the next. Beauty's family conflicts are nothing
compared to those of the Prince. His mother, played by Mark McDonnell,
is an ogre with a taste for human flesh. Having suppressed her appetite
for her son, she is now ravenous for her grandchildren. It means Kathryn
Howden, as the poor Fairy Goody, has to keep her magical powers on the
go throughout Beauty's sleep and into the battles to come.
This is psychologically fascinating, and director Dominic Hill
is fully committed – perhaps too committed – to the bleakness of
Norris's vision. Paddy Cunneen's low-pitched songs do nothing to lift
the spirits, nor does Naomi Wilkinson's set suggest any green shoots of
recovery. There is enough stomping about by John Kielty's towering Ogre
to keep the children thrilled, but the production pursues its theme so relentlessly that it denies us the happy ending we yearn for.
© Mark Fisher, 2012
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Published in the Guardian
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
WHEN Charles Dickens conceived the character of Ebenezer Scrooge,
it is unlikely that he had in mind a large woman in a spangly leotard,
bejewelled shoulder pads and curly black wig. But in Johnny McKnight's
raucous revision of A Christmas Carol, the writer, director and star makes a convincing case for Scrooge as Dame.
As an avaricious money-lender and sole proprietor of Marley & Me, this Aganeza Scrooge has survived the loadsamoney era
to become the epitome of bah-humbug misanthropy. Selfish and merciless,
she spends much of the show chatting up terrified audience members.
Sharp-tongued, waspish and given to ad-libbing, she is also very funny.
This
larger-than-life creation inhabits an all-female landscape that's
a dizzy amalgam of Victorian London (all mockney accents, decaying teeth
and fatal childhood illnesses), modern-day Glasgow (the Ghost of Panto
Present is a perfectly realised Jimmy Krankie
lookalike) and Strictly-style dance routines ("Get that, Lisa Riley").
If Kenny Miller's baroque black-and-white designs weren't quite so
tasteful, you'd call it uncouth.
Where McKnight is a vision of
heightened callousness, the others revel in exaggerated pathos. Anita
Vettesse's Cratchit contemplates a Christmas dinner featuring a
sparrow-sized turkey yet refuses to hear a word against her employer,
while Sally Reid's Tiny Tim hobbles around on crutches and sees the good
in everything. That's when the two of them, along with Michele
Gallagher and Helen McAlpine, aren't doubling as 1980s throwbacks, Sally
Bowles-style cabaret singers or 1960s soul queens in their efforts to
teach Aganeza her lesson.
The tongue-twisters, corny jokes
and sweet-throwing are about as far from Dickens as you can get, yet so
brilliantly does McKnight fuse the contradictory strands – bittersweet
social commentary and pugnacious panto – that by the end, when Aganeza
finally sees the error of her ways, he strikes a chord of genuinely
warming Christmas cheer.
© Mark Fisher, 2012
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Published in the Guardian
Arches/Catherine Wheels
Four stars
IT'S not so much the spirit of Christmas birth as of Easter resurrection that possesses this Hans Christian Andersen
adaptation by Catherine Wheels. It begins, delightfully, in a
farmyard-cum-maternity unit where first pig, then horse, and finally
mother hen are bringing their young into the world. Two piglets wobble
out from beneath Gill Robertson's skirts, a floppy foal appears in
Laurie Brown's field and, after much concentration, Veronica Leer fills
an egg box with little white ovals. They're followed by another the size
of a football – a misfit from the start.
Springtime renewal comes easy to the newly hatched ducklings,
perching prettily on Leer's head as they learn to swim before being hung
out on the washing line to dry. For the ugly duckling, by contrast,
rebirth is a tougher call.
Played by Brown in school shorts and
grey balaclava, he'd just love to stretch his enormous wings and walk
tall to a blast of flamboyant disco music. But his siblings are having
none of it. If you've never felt intimidated by a rubber duck, you
haven't seen this lot, lined up on the rooftop and squeaking in unison, a
chilling vision of bullying intolerance.
So off goes the ugly
duckling to find himself, seeing if he can fit in among moles, pedigree
dogs or scavenging foxes. Whether they're hospitable or eager to eat
him, he feels forever out of place.
Created by Andy Manley and
Shona Reppe, this show for younger audiences could perhaps push the ugly
duckling's sense of helpless despair even further (touching though the
scene of wintry isolation is), but offers instead a charming metaphor
about sexual liberation. This swan's awakening comes complete with a
mirror-ball crash helmet and a wings-in-the-air dance to the Village People, a celebratory finale in which he is joyously allowed to be himself.
© Mark Fisher, 2012 (Pic: Niall Walker)
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