Theatre review: Glimmer

Published in the Guardian
Glas(s) Performance at Tramway, Glasgow
Four stars

’TIS THE season to be jolly. Unless you’re Megan Reid and you’re just not feeling it. No matter how many decorations, Christmas jumpers and festive movies your big sister Rosie throws at you, you’d sooner be snuggled up on the couch, keeping it mellow.

As far as plot goes, that’s about the limit of this two-hander by Glas(s) Performance, but that doesn’t stop it being a warming mince pie of a show, quietly digging into an ordinary family history to bring to the surface the bonds that hold us together. Inside this everyday relationship, they find something uplifting, tear-jerking and true.

Megan and Rosie are real-life sisters, graduates of the superb Junction 25 youth theatre run by directors Jess Thorpe and Tashi Gore. Megan is 22 and Rosie one year and two days older. Those two days, she insists, are important, which gives an idea of the quarrelsome territory we are in.

A kind of lopsided cabaret, Glimmer is powered by Rosie’s ebullience and disrupted by Megan’s laidback indifference. Even when persuaded to pick up her guitar, Megan offers only half-tempo indie-folk renditions of Christmas favourites, sweet-voiced but morose. Her downbeat vibe almost – but only almost – brings Rosie’s puppy-dog bouncing to a halt. After 22 years together, they have been here before and will be again.

But, just as neither has shaken off the squabbles of their childhood, neither has let go of the shared experience, the kinship and all those Christmases together. However mismatched they may seem physically and temperamentally, they have a relationship closer than any other. Just look at the gorgeous sequence where they watch It’s a Wonderful Life in positions more intimate than even lovers would adopt.

There is cruelty to come but beyond it a reconciliation rich in seasonal sentiment. It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: The Devil Masters

Published in the Guardian
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Two stars

YOU KNOW know when you’re given a Christmas present, and you smile gratefully even though it’s misshapen, not to your taste and you’re not sure what it actually is? That’s what Orla O’Loughlin’s production of this comedy by Iain Finlay Macleod is like. The Devil Masters seems well intentioned, but it is hard to know what to do with it.

The scene is in an Edinburgh New Town living room – realised in stiflingly naturalistic detail by Anthony Lamble – where the Christmas Eve preparations of two dog-loving advocates are interrupted by an intruder with designs on their Skye terrier. One kidnap, attempted robbery and assault later, the tables are turned and the lawyers take charge. By the end, the tables have turned twice more.

It is not that Macleod is short of ideas. Has he written a class-conscious subversion of the drawing-room comedy? A Tarantino-esque vision of dog-eat-dog status games? A commentary on the slippery surfaces of language and identity, like his own excellent Somersaults? A tribute to the surrealism of Edward Albee’s Seascape? A Jekyll-and-Hyde satire on the division between Edinburgh’s haves and have-nots? A howl of outrage at the power accorded to the legal profession? A spiritual condemnation of those who replace family values with self-interest?

The Devil Masters is partly all of these things, but not fully any of them. It’s like watching the rough drafts of several plays at once. Sometimes one of them flashes into focus, and you find yourself laughing at some wordplay or gripped by a legal debate, but a moment later, you’re watching another play altogether.

Keith Fleming does a great job as the amorphous outsider who is psychopathic one minute and vulnerable the next, while John Bett and Barbara Rafferty play up the contradictions of the homeowners. But they are stuck in an overwrought production of curate’s egg of a play.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: A Christmas Carol

Published in the Guardian

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow

Four stars

YOU could mistake Cliff Burnett's Scrooge for a genial fellow. He's much given to chuckling and seems content with his place in the world. True, he resents his staff taking a day off for Christmas and delights in poking a carol singer in the eyes, but his complaints are less the view of a misanthrope than the expression of a reasoned political philosophy. His laughter is more complacent than cruel.

But in Dominic Hill's gloriously spooky production, played out in monochrome on Rachael Canning's set, Burnett's air of satisfaction becomes less secure. As the supernatural visitations enter his bedroom, his laugh becomes a nervous tick, an expression of doubt instead of certainty. With his red nose, white face and swept-back silvery hair, he is no pantomime baddie, but a misguided man whose worldview is genuinely rattled.

And who wouldn't be rattled by Canning's puppets? The ghost of Jacob Marley is a grinning skull with a grey wig and a torso draped in chains. The Ghost of Christmas Past has the body of a child and the blank-eyed face of a table lamp. At one point, sheets of ectoplasm waft through the auditorium. Only with the fortification of the interval can we cope with the vulture-like Ghost of Christmas Future, a looming giant decked in tattered strips of black material.

With the dissonant scrapes of Nikola Kodjabashia's live score falling into line with the poetic rhythms of Neil Bartlett's script, it's a dark and austere production that focuses on Scrooge's journey to self-realisation and goes sparingly on the "we was poor, but we was honest" sentimentality of the story. There is also joy in the creativity of the staging: the way the actors throw snow over themselves before coming on and rework Christmas carols to poke fun at Scrooge. It all makes for a rich and satisfying seasonal treat.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Miracle on 34 Parnie Street

Published in the Guardian
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars

THE 1947 seasonal favourite, Miracle on 34th Street, is a modest and sweet-natured comedy with the unfeasibly grand ambition to square the contradictory values of capitalism and religion. However greedy the market gets, the movie suggests, it's nothing that can't be solved by blind faith in a supernatural power. So when the real Father Christmas takes over the grotto at Macy's, he shows the money-grubbing store managers that altruism is not only an end in itself, it can be great for business too. They only have to believe.

If that sounds a stretch, there's an extra layer of faith required at the Tron where, in Miracle on 34 Parnie Street, the unglamorous road behind the theatre has become the location of TJ Confuse, a down-at-heel department store under threat of closure. Not only must we believe the real Father Christmas would fill the job vacancy in this unloved shop, but we must also accept she is female. 

And what a female. Played by writer and director Johnny McKnight in a spangly red dress and an arse designed for twerking, Kristine Cagney Kringle ("single and ready to mingle") is a hilariously improbable saviour of the Christmas spirit. Equally unlikely is that this predatory creature with a coruscating line in audience back-chat would be a multi-linguist who could tick off half-a-dozen languages in a single song. But the evidence is plain to see: Kristine Kringle is the true meaning of Christmas.

By sticking to the movie plot, with an added Machiavellian twist to make room for Darren Brownlie's loose-limbed panto baddie, McKnight holds on to the good-beats-evil message even as he is sending the whole thing up. In this, he is aided and abetted by the romper-suit cuteness of Gavin Jon Wright, the game-for-anything accents of Julie Wilson Nimmo and the awesome vocals of Michelle Chantelle Hopewell.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: James and the Giant Peach

Published in the Guardian
Dundee Rep
Three stars

ONCE upon a time, all the theatre directors in the land decided it was their duty to provide an alternative to pantomime. They would call these performances Christmas shows and would fashion them out of the fairy stories that had inspired their commercial cousins, except these would be proper plays. 

All the boys and girls loved them and even the grown-ups were happy. But one day an evil spell was cast and the directors suddenly grew tired of their Cinderellas and their Snow Queens. "Surely there's something different we can put on," they cried. "What about some Roald Dahl?"

And there was no doubt that when they put on James and the Giant Peach in the short, sharp adaptation by David Wood, the children were happy. They liked it when director Jemima Levick made it look like the peach was growing with a series of ever-bigger orange umbrellas. They liked it when the insects became human-sized and took off on an adventure across the Atlantic. And they liked it when the peach appeared as an enormous orange balloon that bounced around the auditorium. 

But something was missing. It wasn't exactly that this story had nothing to do with Christmas or even winter, although that was an issue. It was more that its emphasis on escapist fantasy (a flying peach!) overshadowed the impulse for reconciliation that characterised the great archetypal narratives. 

After the death of James's Ugly-Sister aunts and the early conclusion of his Cinderella story, the boy, played attractively by Thomas Cotran, had to complete a long journey to New York without having any comparable emotional territory to cover. It made his victory seem hollow. This spiritual emptiness was exacerbated by the amplification of the actors, their well observed performances diminished by the air of frantic noisiness. The result was a peach-flavoured sweet instead of a genuine fruit.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Circus review: Scotch and Soda

Published in the Guardian
St Andrew Square, Edinburgh
Two stars

IT'S a formula with a proven track record. Last year's Limbo, the Australian centrepiece of Edinburgh's Christmas programme, which also enjoyed long runs in London, showed what could happen when you combined a crack team of musicians with a handful of skilled acrobats and framed them with a grungy cabaret aesthetic in the Paradiso Spiegeltent. 

Presented by the Underbelly and Company 2, Scotch and Soda ticks the same boxes, and has musicality enough to keep a festive audience diverted for 60 minutes, but it is no match for Limbo's sassiness, imagination and jeopardy.

The setting is an Austrian bar room where men in Tyrolean hats, braces and calf-length lederhosen play cards over a rough wooden table or knock the dust off ancient-looking suitcases. Ben Walsh's score for the Crusty Suitcase Band has an appropriately Germanic feel, expanding from a jaunty oompah two-step to old-time jazz and swing, with a brief diversion into a rumbling dub deconstruction to add an other-worldly touch to a solo trapeze routine.

Always on the move, the musicians give Scotch and Soda its character and shape, but they also make the circus tricks look like an afterthought. The show has its moments, such as the construction of an Empire State Building of packing cases or the long-bearded Mozes supporting his body by the nape of his neck, but they come in between a surfeit of routine tumbling, underwhelming handstands and sketches that come to nothing. Even the show's one novelty, an act involving three budgies hopping on and off a music stand, has an air of uncertainty.

That one is performed by co-director Chelsea McGuffin who is weirdly the show's only woman. I'd like to complain about the nine-to-one gender imbalance, but prefer to imagine the women have chosen wisely and somewhere a spirited all-female cast is performing a smarter, riskier, more awe-inspiring show.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre preview: Slava's Snowshow

Published in Scotland on Sunday

IT'S 1996 and, as the Edinburgh Fringe kicks off, there's concern at the Assembly Rooms about one of this year's big shows. It's a clown piece from Russia and, although it has already won a Time Out Award in London, nobody in Scotland knows what something with the mysterious name of Slava's Snowshow could be. Business at the box office is perilously sluggish.

The marketing department takes emergency action. Publicist Liz Smith has already seen the show in London and knows it has the potential to be a very big hit. "I thought it was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen," she says today. "But then in the first week it came to Assembly, it hadn't sold and it wasn't being talked about."

Setting out on a mission to make sure it was talked about, she started giving tickets away in the belief that word-of-mouth would do the rest. The plan worked. "We absolutely papered it for the first four or five days and then the following week you couldn't get a ticket," she recalls. "I remember people coming up to me and saying they'd like a ticket and I'd say, 'I'm really sorry, you can't get it now.'"

It was the only show on that year's Fringe that created a real buzz and it was a crucial step in Snowshow's road to global success. Two years later, it won the Olivier Award for Best Entertainment after its run at London's Old Vic and it has now been seen by more than 3 million spectators in 120 cities in 30 countries. In Russia, they've published a book called The Philosophy of Snowshow, with an English translation due out next year. Still going strong after more than 4000 performances, it is back at Edinburgh Festival Theatre after its last sell-out run in 2011.

For chief clown Slava Polunin himself, it'll be a delight to be back in a city that holds such happy memories. "The British people just opened the doors to this show," he says. "Edinburgh is a great festival. It's such a happiness and joy to be there. You can be there with or without a show, just being there, hanging around – it's such a specific atmosphere when the whole town is living the same event. I'm dreaming about going there again."

A world away from the knockabout pratfalls of the big top, Snowshow is poetic and poignant, a performance that turns the popular spectacle of clowning into a high art of visual grace. Full of magical transformations, it blends slapstick with beautiful imagery, gradually building towards the triumphant closing sequence in which Slava rips up a love letter only to watch it turn into a blizzard of snowflakes.

The joy is infectious and, indeed, connecting to the audience is something he can't avoid. "We have no choice because the people who are on the stage are in society, they are living life with people," he says. "They can't just be on stage and demonstrate something. What they need is to party and to be happy together with other people, with the audience."

Born in 1950 in small-town Novosil, 225 miles south of Moscow, Slava had an early love of Charlie Chaplin and Marcel Marceau which developed into a full-blown obsession with clowning. After training in St Petersburg, he honed his skills in mime, street theatre and visual comedy, setting up his first company, Litsedei, in 1979. 

He learnt not only from silent cinema but also from the silence of the great mime artists on stage. "The silence of Marceau was a great silence, a cosmic, magic silence," says Slava, who is also artistic director of the St Petersburg Circus. "I've also seen wonderful silence in the early shows of Jean-Louis Barraut [the French actor, director and mime artist]. It inspired me so much. I consider the greatest show on stage to be a silent one. Charlie Chaplin used music so it wasn't complete silence, but as a teacher, a master, he has a very important place for me. I love Chaplin's contemporary, Harry Langdon, even more. Langdon was much more fine tuned, much more tender, so I love him more than Chaplain."

Inheriting a tradition that extends all the way back to the theatre of ancient Greece and Rome, Slava practices the art of the outsider. He is the figure of fun who is secretly the wisest of all, the stumbling fool who is actually more dextrous than anyone, the grown-up man who has never lost his child-like sense of wonder and imagination. A clown, he says, is a "person who, on entering the room, brings joy and love for life".

Although it has its origins in the late 1980s, Snowshow has been reinventing itself ever since. It never stops changing. Slava has a profound belief in the importance of spontaneity and goes to great lengths to ensure he and his company stay creative. It means giving them holidays and encouraging them to develop outside interests – and it also means shaking things up every night. "This is a science and I am expert in it," he says. "You always have to find a new creative challenge for the team to keep the stage activity interesting. My performers know which part they are going to perform only half an hour before the show. All the time, we change direction, change the style and the mood of the show. That's very important to keep it interesting and fresh."

Slava's Snow Show, Edinburgh Festival Theatre, 3–6 December.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: The Voice Thief

Published in the Guardian

Catherine Wheels at Summerhall, Edinburgh

Five stars

WHAT makes novels such as 1984 and Brave New World so troubling is that you could imagine their plots happening for real. Wouldn’t we all be comforted by having an avuncular Big Brother in our lives? Which of us wouldn’t sign up to a soma holiday in a unified World State? It’s the same with the autocratic Dr Broderick Mackenzie in Catherine Wheels’ superb promenade performance: he’s scary because he is so reasonable.

Played by Ian Cameron, he’s a man you’d be happy to entrust your children to. With his extravagant hair and flamboyant neckerchief, he has a touch of the Willy Wonkas, but mainly, he projects a sense of reassurance. That’s why we willingly follow him into his Mackenzie Institute for the Encouragement of Vocal Harmony, despite having to put on masks and subject ourselves to the decontamination chambers of Karen Tennent’s endlessly inventive set.

It’s also why we go along with him as he describes his scientific method for removing unpleasant sounds from little girls’ voices. We sympathise with him for having oversensitive hearing and admire his laboratory technique for extracting just the right noise. Indeed, we’re quite a long way into Gill Robertson’s production before his daughter Beatrice (an excellent Jenny Hulse) finds the radical voice to tell us something is amiss. The man whose favourite record is the soundtrack to My Fair Lady is a kind of psychopathic Henry Higgins.

But this is no abstract dystopian fantasy. Scripted by Robert Alan Evans, The Voice Thief is a deeply felt cry of outrage at the injustice of female voices being silenced, emotions repressed and personalities muted. Going beyond the production’s sci-fi fun, Beatrice takes a revolutionary step towards emancipation, making it everything a piece of theatre should be: not just funny, tense and alarming, but politically engaged, angry and inspirational.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Colquhoun & MacBryde

Published in the Guardian
Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars

WE'RE in the ration-book London of Dylan Thomas, Wyndham Lewis and Francis Bacon. It’s a curious place that swings from bohemian excess to battened-down austerity. Into this wartime world step Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, graduates of the Glasgow School of Art hell-bent on smashing their way into the establishment – and smashing themselves up in the process.

Slimmed down to an efficient two-hander since its 1992 Royal Court debut, John Byrne’s play is a true-life portrait of two largely forgotten artists who arrived at the GSA a generation before he did. Played by Andy Clark as the talented Colquhoun and Stephen Clyde as the chippy MacBryde, they are a fascinating bundle of contradictions. Irreverent outsiders who yearn for approval, they have an equal passion for creativity and drunken self-destruction. They can switch from cruelty to tenderness within a sentence.

It takes a while for Andy Arnold’s studio production to settle and the scatter-gun gags of Byrne’s script to start hitting their mark, but once they do, the two actors do a gripping job. They are an us-against-the-world unit, a private and professional double act, whose relationship is characterised by mutual support and occasional bouts of jealousy, driven by an infectious combination of ambition and ability.

They are rock’n’roll rebels ahead of their time, who are defeated less by their hedonism than by forces beyond their control. Colquhoun and MacBryde’s era was one of rapid cultural change. One minute they were being feted as the natural successors to Picasso, their angular expressionism seeming bold and modern; the next, they were being eclipsed by Jackson Pollock, whose free-form abstractions made them look as dated as the crooners who came before Elvis. It all makes for a raucous and touching study of two men out of time.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Bondagers

Published in the Guardian
Royal Lyceum
Four stars

IMMEDIATELY in front of us, a woman is crouched down chopping turnips with a cleaver. In the middle of the stage, two others are knocking the earth off a crop of potatoes, while beyond them the lady of the house is chatting to one of the farmhands. And beyond them still, half hidden in the low winter mist, a figure is collecting sticks in a wicker basket.

This sense of space distinguishes Lu Kemp’s painterly staging of Sue Glover’s play, an evocation of life on a 19th-century Borders farm. From the moment the cast appear in silhouette at the back of Jamie Vartan’s elemental set, Kemp treats the stage like it had the full dimensions of a field. Thanks to Simon Wilkinson’s superb lighting, those dimensions are always uncertain. As the colour temperature increases from cold monochrome to chilly sepia, the landscape is always bigger than those who tread on it.

First seen in 1991, this contemporary Scottish classic is set at a time when male farm workers would be hired on condition of bringing a female worker, or bondager, with them. Poetic, musical and elliptical, the play rises organically from the soil, its narrative line about a sexual assault emerging almost accidentally from its imagistic collage.

Kemp’s six-strong cast hit a strident note from the start, their delivery as tough and hard-edged as the bondagers’ lives. Though they’re a tight acting ensemble, they’re playing women who are atomised and self-reliant. They are more likely to catch the audience in the eye than each other.At times the pitch is brash and unrelenting, but the production brilliantly captures the play’s swirling impressionism, segueing from folk ballad to clog dance to field tilling as it feeds on Glover’s understated feminist rage.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: The Gamblers

Published in the Guardian
Greyscale/Dundee Rep
Three stars

NOBODY is what they seem in Nikolai Gogol’s comedy of card sharps and confidence tricksters. The play that set the template for David Mamet’s House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, not to mention eight series of the BBC’s Hustle, recognises the innate theatricality of the grifter’s art. The pretence of the stage neatly parallels the pretence of the conman. Before long we’re dealing with deceits within deceits within deceits.

That seems to be why Selma Dimitrijevic’s production for Greyscalebegins in a locker room with the six actors getting changed from their everyday clothes into the trousers, braces and jackets of Gogol’s 19th-century gamblers. It also seems to be why they change, in the process, from female to male.

Along with Maxine Peake playing Hamlet in Manchester and Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Henry IV in London, Dimitrijevic’s production is part of an unofficial autumn assault on theatre’s well-documented male dominance. Valuable corrective it may be, but whether it adds anything to the play, newly translated by Dimitrijevic and Mikhail Durnenkov, is a moot point.

This man’s world of status games, brinkmanship and bravado is neither illuminated nor satirised by the casting. Although the actors make some attempt at male body language, they go only so far and don’t appear to have anything to say about male behaviour. Less aggressive, more accommodating and quicker to smile than your average group of men, they call attention to the pretence without offering any insight in return.

All the same, it’s a fluidly staged production, with a strong ensemble spirit and a lively musicality. Amanda Hadingue proves there’s no one more gullible than a conman as her Iharev goes from self-satisfied trickster to bewildered victim, stitched up by a cool and confident Hannah McPake as Uteshitelny who shows herself master of “social engineering of the highest order”.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Three Sisters

Published in the Guardian

Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars

WATCHING John Byrne’s new adaptation of the Chekhov classic, it’s hard to put aside the memory of Alasdair Gray’s notorious “colonisers and settlers” essay. This was the pre-referendum broadside in which the novelist used the loaded language of imperial Britain to describe incomers to Scotland. As Gray saw it, there were those who used the country as a stepping stone for a career elsewhere and those who stayed to make a lasting contribution.

Seen in these terms, Byrne’s three sisters, renamed Olive, Maddy and Renee Penhalligan, plus brother Archie, are instinctive colonisers. They’re an upper-class English military family at the start of the 1960s, shored up in small-town Dunoon because of its proximity to the Holy Loch submarine base, but wishing all the while to be in London. Circumstance, however, makes them settlers. They may dream of the big city, they may be bored by provincial life, they may quote Rupert Brooke’s line about “some corner of a foreign field” being “for ever England”, but, whether as teacher or as district councillor, they are slowly becoming rooted.

If anything, it’s the locals who are most damaged by the dysfunctional relationship. Somewhere off stage, an officer’s wife is making suicide attempts, while Louise McCarthy as Archie’s new wife Natasha replicates the class power structure as she goes from Wemyss Bay innocent to tyrannical lady of the manor. With Byrne’s characteristic wit, she takes on a strangulated hybrid Anglo-Scots accent as she does so.

Elsewhere, the Anglophone setting minimises the opportunity for Byrne’s most baroque language, but director Andy Arnold does the adaptation tremendous justice in a beautifully controlled staging that’s loaded with fine performances. With their radiant red ringlets and sliding scale of accents, Muireann Kelly, Sally Reid and Jessica Hardwick make a compelling central trio, all dry wit and tough sisterly honesty, resignedly tolerating Jonathan Watson’s touchingly ineffectual Archie.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Outlying Islands

Published in the Guardian
Seen at Heart of Hawick
Three stars

WHEN civilisation finally catches up with Shakespeare’s Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest, there’s the assumption that they’ll leave their island behind. This magic and wildness is all very well, but it’s no match for society. Heading back to Italy, with all its order and discipline, is taken as read.

There’s a similar conflict between the tame and the wild in David Greig’sOutlying Islands. First seen in 2002 and now revived by director Richard Baron in a quietly absorbing production for the Borders-based Firebrand company, it begins with two young men from the ministry showing up on an Outer Hebridean rock.

This is 1939 and, with war breaking out in Europe, the island could be the wilderness the authorities need to carry out their anthrax tests. That’s news to James Rottger’s buttoned-up John and Martin Richardson’s libertarian Robert. As far as they’re concerned, they’re here to conduct an ornithological survey. To spend a few weeks in such a pristine environment has been their lifetime ambition.

As in The Tempest, it’s assumed they’ll go back home at the end of their stay. But what would happen, speculates Greig, if nature overwhelmed their stiff-upper-lip reserve? What if the island’s Miranda – Helen Mackay’s wide-eyed Ellen – offered an alternative way to live with her seductive mixture of innocence and sexual freedom? What if the opportunity to swim naked, to be unobserved, to be as unburdened by morality as the animals, became too great to resist? Why leave the island at all?

In this way, John and Robert are opposing aspects of our own personalities. We empathise with the self-restraint of one, but envy the lack of inhibition of the other and, once they’ve seen off the paternalistic hand of Crawford Logan as Ellen’s uncle, it’s hard to see why they shouldn’t answer the call of the wild.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Hamlet

Published in the Guardian

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow

Four stars

SOMEWHERE at the back of the open stage, Ben Onwukwe, as the ghost of the old king, stands in silhouette beneath a fierce white light, his voice compressed and crackly like an analogue broadcast. Nikola Kodjabashia’s live score, a cacophony of strummed piano wire, open strings and rumbling percussion, has risen to a formidable volume. At the point of greatest intensity, the focus cuts abruptly to Brian Ferguson’s Hamlet. Downstage, warmly lit, with a sea of darkness behind him, it’s as if he’s stepped into the room with us.

And you can imagine him doing that. With his sensible suit, black glasses and air of studiousness (his preferred reading is Dante), this Hamlet is not a natural hero but an ordinary young man placed in extraordinary circumstances. He’s prone to the occasional outburst but, more typically, he’s thoughtful and considered. Yes, he vacillates, but only as much as anyone would if they suspected the poisoner of their father to be Peter Guinness’s Claudius. He is an unnerving mix of the sleazy and the diplomatic.

What emerges in Dominic Hill’s exhilarating production is the story of a good man’s struggle against a society full of corruption and suspicion. A flank of reel-to-reel tape recorders suggests an era of cold-war surveillance. The speed with which Cliff Burnett’s Polonius changes character – from a bumptious bon vivant with a Paul Raymond moustacheto a brutal patriarch keeping his daughter, Ophelia, in line – suggests a male-dominated society that has little place for Hamlet’s sensitivities, let alone female values.

No wonder Meghan Tyler’s strident Ophelia turns to drink and dies the vodka-induced death of a 1960s rock casualty. It’s the only way to cope with the pressure. With Roberta Taylor’s Gertrude reduced to a defeated mumble, Hill’s lucid production is a study of the forces that drive fathers and sons to destruction.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Kill Johnny Glendenning

Published in the Guardian

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Three stars

ONE of last year’s biggest Scottish theatre hits was David Harrower’s Ciara, a monologue about a woman born into a Glasgow crime family and doing all she can to get out. With Kill Johnny Glendenning, playwright DC Jackson is in similar territory, only this time he plays it as farce. Where Harrower gave us a subtle meditation on the difficulty of cultural change, Jackson offers a Tarantino-esque bloodbath of violent excess and a script of machine-gun hilarity.

Set in a farmhouse hideaway – or, as Jackson’s colourful turn of phrase would have it, a “sub-human shit-shack in the anus of Ayrshire” – the play is about the kidnapping of an investigative reporter caught up in a gangland feud over the proceeds of a heroin shipment. In the flashback second act, which cleverly gives us the motivations behind the seemingly random killings of the first, we learn that one of the kidnappers is married to the mob. His wife, like Harrower’s Ciara, is determined to get out.

The world she’s escaping is one of cartoonish bravado, shaped by the romantic glamour of the gangster movie and the mystique of the celebrity criminal. One of the kidnappers wears a suit inspired by Al Pacino in Scarface, while the rival crime bosses boast of the number of books written about them.

Like the others in Mark Thomson’s full-blooded production, David Ireland gives a scarily funny performance. As the eponymous lead, he always carries an air of psychopathic menace (despite Johnny’s love of reggae stalwarts Aswad). I laughed a lot, but kept feeling the play was only ever as good as the last joke. Despite its echoes of Glasgow’s real-life ice-cream wars, Jackson’s comic universe has more murderous exuberance than satirical bite.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Still Game

Published in the Guardian

Hyrdo, Glasgow

Three stars

THE last time I saw Still Game on stage was at the Brunton in Musselburgh, a theatre with a capacity of 300. That was in the late 1990s and now, after six television series, sundry seasonal specials and a seven-year hiatus, Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill have built up the pulling power to play a 21-night run at the Hydro in front of 12,000 people a time.

This is theatre on a scale I have never seen. It’s so big, I’m not even sure theatre is the right word for it. The stage is dominated by three giant screens showing a sophisticated live edit of the sitcom action below. Even in the posh seats, it feels more like being a studio audience.

With voices echoing, Gavin Mitchell’s Boaby the barman opens up at the Clansman in time for his regulars, while Sanjeev Kohli’s Navid sets out the value pies in the corner shop. The audience – or is it a rally? – roars its approval with every arrival, not least when everybody’s favourite geriatric jesters Jack and Victor finally show up in Jack’s front room.

So far so cosy, but then something extraordinary happens. Sensing the untheatrical nature of their own TV love-in, Kiernan and Hemphill move from self-referential jokes about the inadvisability of comeback gigs to a meta-theatrical discussion about the fourth wall. Before we know it, they’ve switched to direct audience address and full-on standup patter.

They transform the energy in the room and, although the show settles back into sitcom familiarity for a story about Jack giving a drunken, transatlantic, father-of-the-bride speech, the stakes have been raised. All it takes is for Jane McCarry’s rosy-cheeked Isa to drink some magic mushroom soup and the stage becomes a hallucinogenic Bollywood spectacular. It’s a thrilling end to Michael Hines’s production and a narrow theatrical victory.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: The Glass Menagerie

Published in the Guardian

Dundee Rep

Four stars

"THINGS have a way of turning out so badly," runs the caption along the top of Alex Lowde's set. It's the most telling of a series of quotations from the Tennessee Williams classic that flash up throughout Jemima Levick's production. It is the director's way of reminding us of the theatrical artifice.

Levick takes her cue from the playwright's opening monologue, in which Tom Wingfield tells us about the play ahead, outlining the construction, conceits and symbolism of his autobiographical tale of an overbearing mother, a pitifully shy sister and the narrator himself, a Shakespeare-in-waiting.

Played by Robert Jack with still and steady control, he brings on a microphone to address us directly, like a self-aware performance artist. The set behind him is raised as if it too were in quotation marks, something to be examined like poor Laura Wingfield's collection of glass trinkets. Levick's introduction of movement sequences, choreographed by Joan Clevillé, are too intrusive an attempt to turn the domestic into the poetic, but you can see what she's driving at.

In most productions, Amanda Wingfield is a larger-than-life matriarch with a delusional memory of her upbringing in the American south. Here, Irene Macdougall is very much life-size, a woman already defeated by her fall into single parenthood, cheap fabrics and an apartment that's all dowdy autumnal colours. Mark Doubleday emphasises the gloomy air by lighting the room with the heavy shadows and harsh highlights of an Edward Hopper painting. Amanda's level of self-deceit escalates, but her hopes for Laura's first and only gentleman caller are born of sad desperation, not real belief.

Opposite a personable Thomas Cotran as the dinner guest, Millie Turner plays the fragile Laura with an eagerness to please that makes her luckless story even sadder. For all the self-consciousness of the staging, it remains a touching and tender tale.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Ubu and the Truth Commission

Published in the Guardian

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Three stars

"WHAT is it that you wash away?" says Busi Zokufa's Ma Ubu as she once again catches her husband spending too long in the shower. Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi is a scatological send-up of Shakespeare's Macbeth, but in this retelling, it is the tyrannical Pa Ubu (Dawid Minnaar), who has trouble ridding himself of that damn'd spot.

As he stands in the shower cubicle, still in his unbecoming vest and underpants, we see an animation by director William Kentridge that illustrates in scratchy white-on-black the guilty secrets he is trying to cleanse himself of. Tumbling towards the plughole is a torrent of human skulls and bones.

In Ubu and the Truth Commission, South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company, famed for its work on War Horse, reframes the Jarry original work in terms of the post-apartheid truth and reconciliation commission. Ma Ubu thought her husband was out philandering, but he was actually running a death squad – represented by a three-headed puppet dog – with the complicity of the state. In her blinkered naivety, she seems to regard this as a lesser crime.

Pa Ubu isn't convinced he has anything to apologise for as the new South Africa is born, but for safety's sake he feeds his incriminating documents, video tapes and instruments of torture to a paper-shredding crocodile. His amoral indifference is in contrast to the first-hand testimonies we hear about police brutality, translated from the original languages and accompanied by Kentridge's darkening images. The implication is that he and his establishment cronies have got off lightly.

Ubu would seem more gruesome in a production with more anarchic energy, and the play surely can't pack the same political punch as it did on its 1997 premiere, but it is a fascinating response to an extraordinary time.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: Helen Lawrence

Published in the Guardian

King's Theatre, Edinburgh

Two stars

PERHAPS you're a fan of the theatre. What you like is the moment-by-moment thrill of seeing actors perform and a story unfolding in your imagination. Or maybe you're more of a movie buff. You prefer to be immersed in a cinematic dream. Either way, you'll be frustrated by Helen Lawrence, a multimedia hybrid from Canadian Stage that is expensive, hollow and neither one thing nor the other.

The technique, developed by director Stan Douglas, is impressive. His actors inhabit a featureless blue landscape where they are picked out in the golden warmth of Robert Sondergaard's lighting. We see them through a gauze screen that, simultaneously, shows them projected in closeup. With the help of blue-screen compositing, Douglas matches these larger-than-life images to the backdrops of the story.

Now the actors we can see on the empty stage appear on screen seeming to lean over the check-in desk in a hotel lobby, to take a trip in the back of car, to venture to an illegal abortionist in a down-at-heel alley or to sleep off a cocktail of booze and pills in a seedy bedroom. It's a trick pulled off with considerable precision.

So, although we take note of the actors on stage, our eyes are repeatedly drawn to the black-and-white images on the big screen. These allude to the film noir of the 1940s – all fedoras, cigarettes and three-piece suits – although only rarely do they capture the high-contrast richness of the genre's shadowy atmosphere.

Likewise, the story, scripted by Chris Haddock, spins a postwar, B-movie yarn involving corrupt cops, backstreet gamblers and the eponymous femme fatale in a semi-lawless Vancouver. It's a world of hat-pin murders, protection rackets and blackmail.

The purpose of the tale, however, is not to reflect on any thematic concerns, but merely to showcase the production's technical ingenuity. Although it takes in greed, deception and exploitation, it has nothing to say about those subjects. Its primary purpose – to emulate a period movie – is of novelty value alone. Despite spirited performances from Haley McGee as a sexually ambivalent bell boy, Lisa Ryder as the glamorous visitor from out of town and the rest of the large company, Helen Lawrence is too flimsy to satisfy as either theatre or film.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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Theatre review: The James Plays

Published in Variety

Edinburgh Festival Theatre

IF IT'S true there was much at stake for the early kings of Scotland as they tried to establish order in turbulent times, it is equally true that everything is riding on playwright Rona Munro’s trilogy of historical 15th-century dramas, “The James Plays.” Not only are these three premieres the centerpiece of the theater program of the 2014 Edinburgh International Festival, but they mark the first collaboration between the National Theater of Scotland (NTS) and the National Theater of Great Britain. Happily, apart from a wobble in the middle play, the gamble has paid off. “The James Plays” take a little-known period of history and turn it into a bold, gripping and funny piece of theatre.

Think of history plays and it’s impossible not to think of Shakespeare. It’s a mark of Munro’s ambition — and her tongue-in-cheek irreverence — that the first major character we see on stage in “James I: The Key Will Keep the Lock” is Henry V. Rather than the high-minded rhetorician of Shakespeare’s play, however, this English king is a foul-mouthed fighter, the muscular equal to the prisoners in his charge who jeer at him like soccer hooligans. The monarchy of 1420 was not the refined system of order and deference we know today but, as the playwright presents it, a brutal and fiercely contested expression of power.

The journey across the three plays, from the return of James I to his native Scotland after 18 years of imprisonment through the birth of the child-king James II in 1430 and the reign of James III from 1460, is the story of a monarchy slowly defining itself. When James I (a romantic fully capable of cruelty in James McArdle’s performance) claims the Scottish throne, it’s a major effort to persuade the lords and nobles even to kneel to him. Forever jockeying for power, they are not given to regarding anyone as their social superior. This James may be an educated, poetry-loving aesthete but, in a semi-lawless land, he knows only brute force can bring about change. Two generations later, however, we find James III (flamboyant, hard-edged Jamie Sives) living the life of a spoiled brat in narcissistic pursuit of pleasure.

There are more Shakespearean echoes in “James II: Days of the Innocents,” in which the maturing king, emotionally damaged yet purposeful in actor Andrew Rothney’s hands, severs his childhood friendships in the same way Shakespeare’s Henry dissociates himself from Falstaff. The conduct of kings is one of Munro’s themes; so too is the birth-pangs of a modern nation, the way a poor, feudal, violent society can begin to find stability and common cause. It’s no coincidence that, a month away from Scotland’s referendum on independence, “James III: The True Mirror” culminates in a galvanizing speech about self-determination and taking a leap into the unknown.

That speech is delivered by Sofie Gråbøl, a cult favorite in the UK thanks to her lead role in the original Danish series of “The Killing” and a compelling presence here as the Danish Queen Margaret, who has limited tolerance for the self-pity and self-indulgence of her husband James III. Along with Blythe Duff, star of long-running UK cop show “Taggart,” she is part of a forceful female presence across the trilogy, which is punchily acted throughout.

Performed on an imposing set (by Jon Bausor) that’s part bear pit and part castle ramparts, with audience members sitting on the stage to create the in-the-round feeling of public spectacle, all three parts are magnificently lit by Philip Gladwell. Helmer Laurie Sansom, making his debut as NTS artistic director, employs the space dynamically, using the full height and width of the set to create a sense of the epic scale of the narrative. If he fails to find coherence in the fragmented and ill-defined second play, he brings tremendous storytelling energy to the magnificent first and third installments, fully justifying the scale and ambition of the project.

© Mark Fisher 2014 
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