Clutter Keeps Company theatre review

Published in Northings

Clutter Keeps Company

Tramway, Glasgow, 17 February 2010, and touring

THIS IS the second play on the trot in which writer Davey Anderson has used storytelling as his key technique. Like his spirited version of the adventures of Zorro at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre before Christmas, Clutter Keeps Company requires the actors to slip in and out of character and take turns as a narrator.

It means all the action happens in a "he said/she said" frame, an approach that plays to theatre's strengths. It encourages direct audience address, fast scene changes and a dressing-up box atmosphere that allows us to accept an actor as a middle-aged mum one moment and a teenager the next.

Fellow playwright David Greig has used the same technique, most recently in his hit comedy Midsummer and also in his teenager-friendly Yellow Moon. It is this play that Clutter Keeps Company most closely resembles, and not only because actor Keith Macpherson starred in both.

The two plays concern a son trying to reconnect with a long-lost father after a spot of criminal behaviour (in this case more imagined than real) and a trek to a far-away Scottish destination (Greig chose a Highland estate, Anderson goes for Millport). They both regard teenage experiences as worthy dramatic material.

But where Greig used his story to explore the pressure on teenagers to conform or rebel, touching on big issues such as self-harm along the way, Anderson is much less clear about what is at stake for his characters.

Money is tight for Nicola Miles-Wildin's single mother, but you could hardly regard her treatment of her children – Stevie (Scott Fletcher) and Julie (Jo Freer) – as neglect. Julie's romance with fairground worker Jim (Macpherson) looks like it will lead her into trouble, but he is not as sleazy as he at first appears and nothing comes of it. The arrival of a family of Mormons next door is similarly without friction.

The only possible source of dramatic tension is Stevie's Asperger syndrome, but even this amounts to little more than a penchant for tidiness and a liking of big numbers. You could argue his obsessive behaviour triggers the events of the play – he gets into trouble after trailing his sister to Jim's deserted fairground – but it would be harder to say that the story resolves anything, either to do with his medical condition or his family relationships.

This failure to establish a central dilemma makes Clutter Keeps Company seem purposeless, which in turn, despite the lively presentation by Birds of Paradise, makes it feel much longer than the 80-minute running time.

Clutter Keeps Company visits Mull Theatre, Tobermory (23 February); Taynuilt Village Hall (24 February); An Lanntair, Stornoway (26 February); New Deer Public Hall, Turriff (2 March); Dornie Hall, Dornie (4 March); Hopeman Memorial Hall (6 March); Tullynessie & Forbes Hall, Alford (16 March).

© Mark Fisher 2010

Zorro, Visible Fictions/Traverse review

Published in The Guardian

Zorro

Traverse, Edinburgh
4 out of 5

Zorro, it often seems, is simply not there. He's just a swish of a sword and a swoop of a cape, a blur of movement perplexing his enemies and thrilling his audience. At other times, he is a cardboard cut-out, perching on a rooftop that has suddenly appeared from nowhere on Robin Peoples's pop-up book of a set (which gets its own spontaneous burst of applause). At other times still, he is no superhero at all, but plain old stable boy Don Diego de la Vega, played by Sandy Grierson with a humility that contrasts with the swagger he brings to the masked swordsman.

Zorro, in this Visible Fictions/Traverse co-production, is an enigma, an ideal, a man of perfect athleticism and flawless morals, as sexually potent as he is awesome in combat. Yet this is also a story with loud echoes of The Ugly Duckling. Playwright Davey Anderson shows us the powerless boy behind the mask, an orphan whose inner strengths go unappreciated, not least by Claire Dargo's Isabella. When she tells Zorro he is "deeply misunderstood, like me", the line resonates with irony.

In Douglas Irvine's production, Richard Conlon adds a streak of Iago-like malice as a duplicitous Captain Esteban, driving the plot forward as he threatens chastity, innocence and honour. Borrowing the style (and one of the jokes) of David Greig's 2008 musical Midsummer, this is a compelling piece of third-person storytelling in which the three actors create a vivid sense of a pre-gold rush California with the swashbuckling pace of an adventure movie.

In the best Saturday matinee tradition, it even ends with the possibility of a sequel – and this is one Zorro who deserves to fight another day.

Until Christmas Eve. Box office: 0131-228 1404.

© Mark Fisher 2009

Zorro: interview with Douglas Irvine and Davey Anderson

Published in Scotland on Sunday

Zorro preview

WHEN artistic director Dominic Hill decided it was time Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre entered the Christmas market, he was faced with the dilemma of what kind of show to put on. His rival theatres have carved out their own niches – panto at the King's, musicals at the Playhouse, the more traditional storytelling of Peter Pan at the Lyceum – and there was no point in playing them at their own game.
He turned to Douglas Irvine, artistic director of the children's company Visible Fictions, who suggested that what they needed was the equivalent of a Saturday afternoon family film.

"I thought it would be something people might not expect you to try or that might not even be possible to put on stage," says Irvine. "We rumbled around Indiana Jones and The Great Escape and then we landed on Zorro."

The swashbuckling masked outlaw – created by Johnston McCulley in 1919 in The Curse Of Capistrano and reinvented in countless comics, films and TV shows – seemed to be just what they were looking for. So Irvine called on playwright Davey Anderson to re-imagine the adventures of Don Diego de la Vega (Zorro's real identity) for the stage – sword fights and all – in a piece of family entertainment for six-year-olds and up.

By chance, they found the Robin Hood-style escapades were a perfect match for the seasonal spirit. "Zorro is like this mysterious benefactor, which seems to tie in to Christmas time," says Irvine. "It's got all the stock elements – the romance, the adventure, the goodie, the baddie – that make it feel like a Christmas show, but it's undoubtedly a play."

Anderson, whose play Liar won the gong for best children's show in this year's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland, realised that Zorro offered him tremendous flexibility in terms of a story. Unlike many action hero tales, there is no definitive version and not even a consistent set of characters. This freed him to come up with his own fast-moving interpretation, one that made space to explore the man behind the mask as well as the feats of derring-do.

"Zorro is one of these characters you're aware of but you don't know the details, unlike Superman or Batman," says Anderson, who in his parallel career as a musician is working on the score for the National Theatre of Scotland's forthcoming Peter Pan. "I had a huge marathon of watching all the Zorro films that were ever made and reading lots of the books. He has been constantly rewritten as time has gone on, so this gave me a chance to write a classic family adventure story without being tied to doing an adaptation. Essentially I came up with a new story, but it should feel like an old one."

The story of this Zorro, then, is of a man learning how to become a hero and facing the moral choice of whether to become a vigilante or to fight for the greater good. "Diego de la Vega, who is the daytime identity of Zorro, should be just as interesting a character as Zorro," says Anderson. "A big part of the love interest comes in the triangle between Diego, the girl that he loves, Isabella, and this masked man she is enamoured of, not realising he is the same guy."

It's this emotional story that puts the play into more complex territory than a straightforward thrills-and-spills adventure, although there will be plenty of that as well. With Sandy Grierson playing Zorro – sharing the stage with Richard Conlon as a military captain and Claire Dargo as Isabella – the production aims to match the excitement of an action movie with a fast-paced theatrical style of its own.

When composer David Trouton saw the rehearsals he described it as "a living cartoon". "You see this guy wrestling with who he is and what he's about, which goes beyond that boys' story, but there is an action feel about it," says Irvine.

Anderson was delighted by the opportunities the story opened up. "It's so unusual as a writer to be given the brief to write action sequences," he says. "It was very brave of Dougie to ask me to write something that was impossible to stage. How do you write a horse chase or how do you write a sword fight at the same time as there's something dramatic going on?

"It's about finding a visual logic that suggests some of it and gives some of the pictures, but still leaves a lot to the imagination. That's what makes it theatrical rather than a movie version. The fact that there's three storytellers brings a joy to it."

"We're trying to make it an all-round family experience," says Irvine.

"Boys and their grannies," chips in Anderson.

"Or daughters and their dads," counters Irvine.

Zorro, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, Friday until 24 December

© Mark Fisher