Published in the Scotsman
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Three stars
SINCE 1936, Maw Broon has suffered the indignity of being two dimensional. As the stock mother in a comic strip, she is a figure without depth or hinterland. In
this, as poet Jackie Kay sees it, she has something in common with a
generation of women whom emancipation passed by and with the nation
itself, torn between couthiness and modernity, dependence and freedom.
In
a show first seen in 2009, now revamped to embrace the referendum
debate, Kay presents Broon as a woman bereft of an identity, struggling
to escape the confines of her picture frame by means of reality TV or a
crash course in sex, politics and body-image debates. Played by Terry
Neason, she is all stiff limbs and jings-crivvens catchphrases, until
Suzanne Bonnar shows up as her consciousness-raising doppelgänger.
It’s
a promising premise and, with songs by Alan Penman and Tom Urie (the
highlight being the soft jazz dreaminess of Maw Broon Looks at the
Moon), it makes for popular political cabaret. In its vision of a woman
waking up to her own oppression it recalls Isn’t It Wonderful To Be A
Woman in The Steamie.
Throw in the national dimension and it could
have been incendiary, but the show is jovial more than funny, topical
more than polemical, so Liz Carruthers’s Glasgay production is a gentle
diversion, not a radical call to arms.
© Mark Fisher 2013
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