Heaven, Traverse/Play, Pie, Pint review

Published in The Guardian

Heaven

Òran Mór, Glasgow
3 out of 5

I had assumed Simon Stephens would have reworked his short two-hander since the summer when the Traverse gave it a breakfast reading on the ­Edinburgh fringe. But here it is in a fuller but still bare-bones production for A Play, a Pie and a Pint, the lunchtime theatre season, with the same oddball charm and the same feeling that its deeper meaning is just out of grasp.

On balance, this is a good thing, not least because Heaven's combination of character comedy, plot revelations and philosophical reflection suit the ­laid-back lunchtime format. Give or take the odd fudged line, Dominic Hill's production makes a lively, if elliptical start to a five-play run of Traverse co-productions.

The scene is a departure lounge where two strangers awaiting a flight to Turin fall into a dispute over some ­litter. Kyle (Sean Scanlan), a 67-year-old former pianist is just the sort of ­busybody the younger Sean (Robert Jack) would sooner avoid as he makes a break for freedom from his job in a North Berwick hotel.

What starts as an amusingly pedantic struggle moves into less certain territory. Behind Kyle's fuddy-duddy appearance lies a bit of a radical – and perhaps something of the deus ex machina – although not radical enough to embrace Sean's decision to escape his idyllic ­family life. In place of a predictable kind of heaven, the father of two has opted for the thrill of the unknown.

The unsettling comedy finds a resolution of sorts in Kyle's incongruous rendition of Heaven, the trippy ode to celestial emptiness by Talking Heads. Whether from a beauty spot or an airport, Sean is escaping from a "place where nothing ever happens", like an artist searching for life whatever the personal cost.

Until Saturday. Box office: 0844 477 1000. Then at Traverse, Edinburgh (0131-228 1404), 2-6 March.

© Mark Fisher 2010

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland: shortlists announced

Published in The Guardian.

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland: shortlists announced

The nominations for this year's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland applaud site-specific work – and prove that companies don't need a permanent building to create great productions

The shortlists are out for the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland (or CATS), the annual chance for my colleagues and I to give an extended round of applause to the best shows of the year – and take a snapshot of the theatre landscape. In recent years, the awards have tended to be dominated by a single big show: Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia in 2005, Gregory Burke's Black Watch in 2007, Dominic Hill's Peer Gynt in 2008. But what's invigorating about this year's list is that the nominations are widely spread.

David Leddy's Sub Rosa, Jemima Levick's Beauty and the Beast and the David Greig/Gordon McIntyre collaboration Midsummer all have four nominations. Vanishing Point's Interiors and James Brining's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? have three. These shows will prove tough competition for each other at the awards ceremony on 14 June.

But beyond the headlines – 11 nominations for the Traverse, eight for Dundee Rep, seven for the Tron – it is good to see such a wide range of companies picking up the plaudits. They range from Matthew Zajac getting a best male performance nod for his one-man play The Tailor of Inverness, produced by Dogstar Theatre from Inverness, to Gerda Stevenson being listed in the best female performance category for The Lasses, O by the small Borders company Rowan Tree.

Although some of the big theatres figure strongly, the non-building-based companies are thriving. It doesn't necessarily mean the touring scene is healthy in Scotland; not all of these companies tour extensively and Leddy's Sub Rosa, for example, was designed for one specific site (under the stage of the Citizens' theatre). Indeed, since the demise of 7:84, Wildcat and a number of other companies with an active touring agenda, rural theatre provision has grown patchy, a problem addressed by a new producing company, Open Book, which has started taking shows from Glasgow's lunchtime series A Play, a Pie and a Pint (another nominee) on the road.

In this respect, there are parallels with the situation in England. However, companies such as Dogstar and Rowan Tree, as well as other nominees TAG, Visible Fictions and Vox Motus have done much to prove that great theatre need not be exclusive to great buildings. It is further justification for the without-walls model of the National Theatre of Scotland – which itself has five nominations – a company founded on the principle that a national theatre exists in the sum total of the nation's theatres, wherever they may be.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Lucky Box by David Harrower, review

Lucky Box

Òran Mór, Glasgow
3 out of 5

As the younger character in David Harrower's drama suggests, Lucky Box is "some kind of fucked-up fairy story". It takes place one afternoon on a forest path where a middle-aged man in a suit is sitting on a plastic container, making it hard for 17-year-old Jack to get by. Played by Stuart Bowman, always an intimidating actor, the man is just the kind of big bad wolf your mother warned you about: tricky and volatile.

It is not clear why Jack doesn't just make a run for it, but the sturdy young actor Scott Fletcher successfully holds his ground. What Harrower offers is a battle for status, the boy undermining the man's assumed authority, seeing through his lies while revealing as little of himself as possible. In Dominic Hill's production, their exchanges are crisp, loaded and tense, combining the toughness of Mamet with the elliptical brevity of Beckett.

Harrower, who proved himself a master of reserve with Knives in Hens and Blackbird, is in characteristically enigmatic form here, although sometimes he makes us feel less tantalised than strung along. His theme is not perfectly articulated, but he seems to be making the connection between society's disregard for its victims and the broken lines of communication between fathers and sons.

For all his conversational dominance, the man has been made impotent by the recession, having lost his job as a school careers adviser. The beating meted out to his son (who is the same age as Jack) by a gang of boys compounds the impression of a callous society. That he hasn't spoken to his son for months suggests that male emotional inarticulacy and economic violence are bound together - a theme Harrower might yet invest with more dramatic weight if he develops this promising play further.

Kyoto, A Play, a Pie and a Pint review

Published in The Guardian © Mark Fisher

Kyoto

3 out of 5

Oran Mor, Glasgow

David Greig has long been fascinated by the contrast between public and private. His characters are always finding themselves in airports, stations and hotel lobbies, places where no one feels at home. This is how it is for conference delegates Lucy and Dan as they stumble into a chilly hotel room in a former communist state for a night of illicit sex.

Since the first frisson of attraction passed between them in Kyoto during a UN meeting, the two have been as sexually repressed as the characters in a Victorian novel. Their 10-year relationship has been defined by negotiations, banquets and presentations, a world in which they feel infantilised and ncapable of developing ordinary human contact.

They project this sense of alienation on to their fellow delegates, whom they regard less as human beings than as nation states. "Nigeria are in twin beds, sharing," says Lucy in a line typical of Greig's wry eye for the surreal. At 30 minutes, Kyoto covers a surprising amount of ground, but underplays the politics of international relations. Although less charming than 2007's Being Norwegian, a kind of companion piece, it is amusingly performed by Matthew Pidgeon and Vicki Liddelle. The first of five joint ventures between A Play, a Pie and a Pint and Edinburgh's Traverse, Dominic Hill's production provides a thoughtful lunchtime diversion.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

David Greig and Gordon McIntyre interview

© Mark Fisher - published in Scotland on Sunday

Two in the bed - David Greig and Gordon McIntyre


DAVID GREIG is improvising his new play as if it had been written by Harold Pinter.
"– Let's go to the Grassmarket.

– Shall we?

–Why?

–I don't know, why shouldn't we?

–Should we?

–I don't know.

–I'd rather go to Canonmills where there is a pub I know."

That, he assures me, is what Midsummer will not be like. At this point in 2008, the prolific playwright is not in the mood for the weighty and the enigmatic. A better starting point would be something light and frivolous like a pop song. And if it were a pop song it would be something lo-fi and literary, like a track by the Edinburgh band ballboy.

Exactly like that, in fact, because sitting next to Greig in the café-bar of Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre is Gordon McIntyre, Mr ballboy himself, his collaborator on Midsummer. "The whole show is a ballboy song," says Greig. "Because the characteristic ballboy song has a story that's particular, eccentric and full of detail, it has a driving emotion and it has a chorus that captures that emotion. The show is like a long song that keeps breaking out into choruses of singing."

The show's subtitle is "a play with music", which can be read in two ways: one, that it is a musical (though not like they make them on Broadway); and two, that the team are playing with music, having fun, doing what they like. "We decided to do it entirely for our own pleasure," says Greig, whose translation of August Strindberg's altogether more serious Creditors has just opened to considerable acclaim in London. "Gordon doesn't need to be doing theatre, he has ballboy. I had plenty of work, I didn't need to be doing another show. So the only point of doing this was if it would be a laugh or pleasurable for us."

Greig first got in touch with McIntyre when he was editing a book in which Scottish writers explained what they liked about England. He'd been drawn to ballboy's homespun storytelling and was particularly taken with a number called 'I Hate Scotland'. He asked the musician for an essay, but secretly had something bigger in mind. "I was listening to a lot of lo-fi and new folk and wondered why theatre music is never the sort of music I listen to," he says. "I lobbed that question gently towards Gordon and we found we were both interested in that notion: what would a lo-fi, indie musical be like?"

With the help of some seed funding from the National Theatre of Scotland, they spent a couple of weeks in a rehearsal room developing ideas with actors Cora Bissett and Matthew Pidgeon. The story (about a couple's lost weekend after a one-night stand in Edinburgh) and the rough-and-ready, low-budget approach sounded just like what the Traverse's artistic director Dominic Hill was looking for when he declared his intention to use the studio theatre for more experimental productions. "It's very small scale, with just two actors playing the instruments on stage," says Greig, who is also directing. "The budget is minuscule. I haven't worked on a budget this low since I was a student. That's good because it keeps the sense of play. Playing is at the heart of this whole project."

They agreed McIntyre's songs would not attempt to move the story forward but, in the best pop song tradition, would deal in emotions and amplify the mood of the moment. "We were never going to get theatrical music out of me," says McIntyre, who is making use of the existing ballboy track 'There Are Only Inches Between Us, But There Might As Well Be Mountains And Trees' and an instrumental arrangement of 'Above The Clouds The Sun Is Always Shining' in an otherwise all-new score.

"There isn't the sense of singing the story forward that you get in some musicals. I've written a huge amount of love songs for ballboy that I've had to explain to people: 'Well, that didn't actually happen to me. The falling in love did, but the storytelling bit didn't.'

"The songs in this show are more like that: using completely different scenarios to illustrate the point that we're talking about."

Greig says: "I would call him up and say: 'I need a song of people wanting to hurtle towards oblivion.' By the next morning there it was, and it's a cracking song."

For McIntyre, who is weighing up whether to introduce the new songs into the ballboy set or to record them as a sideline project, it has been a revelatory experience.

"The great thing about being in a band is you write your own songs and you do your own thing," he says. "I would never want to trade that, but it's a great intellectual exercise to write songs this way. It's a challenge, but I like working close to the deadline and I'm quite good at self-editing. Also, in this environment I'm quite open to handing over the songs and having them tweaked. That's new to me. I'm really enjoying that part of the process where it's a team effort."

Greig predicts the tone will be somewhere between that of Caledonia Dreaming, the happy piece of devolutionary Edinburgh satire he wrote for 7.84 in 1999, and Gobbo, the delirious CATS award-winning piece of children's entertainment he wrote for the National Theatre of Scotland in 2006.

"It's a romantic comedy," he says. "This couple come together at midsummer and have a lost weekend. They're in the midsummer of their lives; after this point the days are drawing in. Midsummer is a bittersweet moment for all those reasons.

"So, if the question is can you have a lo-fi indie musical, I think the answer is yes. It's not going to be a searing analysis of why Wall Street is in the mess that it's in. It doesn't have a take on Iraq. This show is nakedly emotional. If you would like to have a Pinter version, hie thee elsewhere."v

Midsummer (A Play With Songs), Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, October 24-November 15 www.traverse.co.uk, www.ballboymusic.com

© Mark Fisher, 2008

Fall by Zinnie Harris

© Mark Fisher - published in Variety


Fall

A Traverse Theater presentation in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company of a play in two acts by Zinnie Harris. Directed by Dominic Hill.

Kate - Geraldine Alexander
Evener - Cliff Burnett
Guard - Brian Ferguson
Liddel - Kevin McMonagle
Pierre - Darrell D'Silva
Kiki - Meg Fraser
Howard - Paul Hickey
Justine - Samantha Young

Zinnie Harris couldn't have wished for better timing. As Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic faces a pre-trial hearing before the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, where he must answer charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, the playwright is looking at the awkward question of post-war reconciliation. Completing her war-themed trilogy that began with the Royal Shakespeare Company's "Solstice" and "Midwinter," "Fall" dares to ask how a newly peaceful nation should deal with the ugly legacy of civil war. At the hands of helmer Dominic Hill, the play is as somber and austere as it is gripped by moral urgency.

Where "Midwinter" (2004) took place at the close of a war in some unnamed foreign land and "Solstice" (2005) a decade earlier as that same war approached, "Fall" looks at the realpolitik of a nation taking its first shaky steps toward post-war democracy. Darrell D'Silva's Pierre is a popular prime minister, but feels himself little more than a figurehead whose charisma disguises his political inadequacies.

During an evening of drunken self-pity, he accidentally stumbles on a solution to the problem of dealing with the nation's imprisoned war criminals: If a representative of the people condemns them to death, it will make the government look less callous.

Who better to order the executions than Kate (Geraldine Alexander), a woman whose own husband has been exposed as a notorious war criminal? It is with Kate that the heart of Harris' play lies.

She is a woman of compassion and almost endless understanding, who is so willing to face up to her late husband's newly exposed crimes that she makes repeated visits to the cell of Evener (Cliff Burnett), a character with the same caged ferocity as Dr. Hannibal Lecter and a similarly chilling lack of repentance.

There is no denying this country has been the scene of vicious bloodshed and even humanitarian Kate reaches the limits of her liberal tolerance when she is forced to listen to the evidence against the war criminals. Her agreement to their executions comes as a shock to those of us living in pleasant places where capital punishment is a thing of the past, but Harris convincingly portrays the circumstances in which further violence seems like the only route to a lasting peace.

It makes for chewy, serious drama and helmer Hill, on his debut as artistic director of the Traverse, does all he can to intensify the mood of impending terror. With Tom Piper's colorless set of sliding panels and Chahine Yavroyan's restrained lighting, he creates something of the atmosphere of Eastern European theater, all shadows and grim illumination, and a pace that, for all its boisterous outbursts, is typically ruminative.

His cast is excellent, be it Meg Fraser's out-of-her-depth First Lady, Paul Hickey's Machiavellian prime minister's deputy or Kevin McMonagle's weak and humane lover of Kate. Whether powerful or powerless, they have the flavor of real people swept up in the great tide of contemporary politics in a play that worries away at issues that have repercussions around the world. It is a dense, knotty drama, unafraid to address the big issues of our time head on and a triumphant completion of Harris' trilogy.

Set and costumes, Tom Piper; lights, Chahine Yavroyan; sound, Dan Jones. Opened July 24, 2008. Reviewed Aug. 3. Running time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland

The site for the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland is newly updated with information about this year's ceremony.

Meanwhile on Scottish Theatre Links you can catch up with John Byrne, with his latest Slab Boys instalment, and Dominic Hill, outlining his plans for the Traverse Theatre.