Dundee Rep
Two stars
After Tom McGrath's death in 2009, there came speculation
about his legacy. As the first editor of International Times,
the founder of Glasgow's Third Eye Centre (now CCA) and a key supporter of
several generations of Scottish playwrights, he made a major contribution to
the culture.
As a dramatist, he also made a mark. His first plays have
proved durable: The Hard Man recently did a mainstage tour, while Laurel and
Hardy is about to be revived by the Watermill, Newbury.
In the rest of his canon, there are gems ready to be reclaimed, but much of it is
either too experimental or too much of its time and place to endure.
On the strength of this revival by Dundee Rep and Magnetic
North, Kora falls into the latter category. The product of a residency in the
city in 1986, it is a fact-based drama about a campaign by residents in the
peripheral Whitfield area to have improvements made to their low-rise flats. It
has a vaguely agit-prop structure as we see the neighbours, led by the fecund
life-force that is Emily Winter's Kora, transform themselves from victims into
players, only to come up against the bureaucratic might of the council.
As a story of local authority indifference, it might have
made a subplot in Our Friends in the North,
but the stakes are too low to make any of it seem very important. It's hard to
get a sense of the scale of deprivation in the flats, nor do we witness the
worst excesses of council corruption. It isn't helped by the many
inconsequential scenes of tea drinking in the play's lengthy exposition.
Performed in the round in the Bonar Hall, adjacent to the
main theatre, Nicholas Bone's production has a warm-hearted community spirit,
despite its middle-class sheen, but the play remains minor McGrath.
Mark Fisher
Until 7 June (01382 223530). Details: www.dundeerep.co.uk
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