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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Published in Northings
Pitlochry Festival Theatre
ON the first preview performance, the audience entered on an
ordinary winter’s evening and left, so I’m told, to see the first
snowfall of the season. We knew the Pitlochry technical team were good,
but choreographing the weather is something else.
By the time I get there on the press night, the snow is lying thick
on the ground and it’s impossible to think of a seasonal show better
pitched at the Pitlochry audience. For the theatre’s third ever
Christmas production, artistic director John Durnin has capitalised on
the recent success of his summer musicals and fielded a bright and
breezy backstage romance that feels just right for the time of year,
despite lacking even the merest hint of panto.
By Durnin’s own admission, White Christmas is not the most
sophisticated of stories. Based on the Bing Crosby/Danny Kaye movie of
1954, it is about the generation of American men who had to find their
feet back home after serving in the second world war. While Vermont
hotelier General Henry Waverly (James Smillie) struggles to adjust to
civilian life without a battalion to command, his former army
entertainers Bob Wallace and Phil Davis (Grant Neil and Simon Coulthard)
respond in their contrasting ways to the sudden availability of adoring
female fans.
The narrative requires only that Waverly comes to terms with his
retirement, Davis settles down with a steady girl and Wallace finds true
love after a misunderstanding. By the time the three strands come
together, just before the curtain goes up on the closing concert, you
get the impression even the writers have lost interest. All they ever
needed was a framework to hang Irving Berlin’s fabulous songs on. The
story is just an excuse.
And I doubt anyone’s complaining. From the moment Hilary Brooks’s
ten-strong band strikes up, this is a big crowd-pleaser of a show. With
no ambition to change the world, it’s an uncomplicated celebration of
ensemble dance and pre-rock’n'roll popular song. And what songs! White
Christmas . . . Sisters . . . How Deep Is the Ocean . . . they just keep
on coming.
Some of the acting is less persuasive than the singing and, by going
for a more generic West End-style cast, Durnin loses the quirky
individuality that has distinguished some Pitlochry musicals. But
Martine McMenemy and Grant Neal make adorable romantic leads,
choreographer Chris Stuart-Wilson keeps the movement brisk and
entertaining, and the whole show sends the audience home with a happy
festive buzz.
© Mark Fisher, 2012
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Published in the Guardian
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Three stars
IT'S impressive enough that Johnny McKnight is writing, directing and starring in Aganeza Scrooge at Glasgow's Tron this season, but somehow he has also managed to field two Cinderellas. At the MacRobert
in Stirling, there's an updated revival of his 2007 panto, while here
in Edinburgh, he has turned in a musical version set – for reasons best
known to himself – in modern-day Paris.
The concept is that Martin McCormick's unfeasibly hunky Prince
Pierre is on the hunt for a partner to join him in a reality TV show.
Chief among his acolytes are the trashy sisters, superbly played by
Nicola Roy and Jo Freer who, with telepathic precision, deliver half
their lines in unison and totes make the most of McKnight's OMG
teen-speak. Equally besotted is Julie Heatherill's otherwise
level-headed Cinderella, who fails to see through the prince's
self-centredness, even when he interrupts her mid-duet to say he's "not
quite finished yet".
All this, in Mark Thomson's production, makes
for bright and brash entertainment, but the show is caught between
competing traditions. It has the exuberance of panto, but without the
silliness; and it has the narrative ambitions of a more serious
Christmas show but not the psychological complexity.
A case in
point is Cinderella's stepmother. As a witch who draws her power from
unrequited love, she is a standard-issue panto baddie, and Jayne McKenna
plays her as such. But how much scarier would it have been for the
little girl if her father had chosen this woman willingly, rather than
being bewitched? Cinderella is not a story about fanciful supernatural
powers but about the irrationality, unfairness and excesses of a very
real adult world. This show misses a trick by not taking Cinderella's
quest seriously enough.
© Mark Fisher, 2012 (Pic: Eamonn McGoldrick)
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