Promises Promises, Random Accomplice theatre review

Published in The Guardian

Promises Promises

Tron, Glasgow
4 out of 5

You could say this play was purpose-built for readers of this newspaper's ­Education and Society sections. ­Margaret Ann Brodie has just arrived as a supply teacher in a London school when she discovers a community group is about to perform an exorcism on one of her pupils, a six-year-old Somali girl who is an elective mute. The scene is set for a debate about classroom control and multiculturalism: should tolerance of beliefs extend to summoning devils before playtime?

Yet it would be wrong to call ­Douglas Maxwell's gripping monologue an issue play, though it shares much of the ­turbulent uncertainty of ­Blackbird or Oleanna. Promises Promises is based on a true story, but the drama is less about the rights and wrongs of ­witchcraft or the challenges of a ­multilingual ­classroom, and more about the ­character of Brodie herself.

When the head teacher, a fellow Scot, incorrectly refers to The Pride (sic) of Miss Jean Brodie, he ­inadvertently gets this Miss Brodie right. With 40 years' teaching behind her, she is past her prime – even if actor Joanna Tope invests her with a sassy ­sexuality – but it is pride that brings about her ­downfall. Many of her instincts are good, but her snooty "it wasn't like this in my day" attitudes turn a bad ­situation into a catastrophe.

Having started with Muriel Spark, the play passes through the ­doppelganger worlds of Robert Louis Stevenson and James Hogg, as ­Brodie recognises aspects of her own ­childhood in that of the little girl. With that, Maxwell's easy comedy hits dark psychological waters, like ­something by Edgar Allan Poe, as it slowly exposes the damaged woman behind the brusquely efficient teacher. Tope rides the transitions superbly in Johnny McKnight's ­haunting ­production for Random Accomplice, leaving us ­unsettled by a class act.

© Mark Fisher 2010

Promises Promises, Random Accomplice theatre review

Published in Northings

Promises Promises

(Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 4 February 2010, and touring)

TEACHING IS all about living up to a promise. So said an old associate of Maggie Brodie, the supply teacher at the unsteady heart of this excellent one-woman play by Douglas Maxwell. The teacher promises to teach and her job is to fulfil that promise one short lesson at a time.

The promise Brodie keeps, however, is altogether more gruesome. This is a play that starts off as a classroom comedy and ends up as a dark psychological horror story. On the way, it has all the slippery twists and turns of a gripping page-turner.

Promises Promises, produced by Random Accomplice, was inspired by a true story from a London school. A six-year-old Somali girl was refusing to talk, so a community leader was allowed into the classroom to perform a ritual to rid her of devils. In Maxwell's version, Brodie is outraged by this intervention but, as the supply teacher, is powerless to stop it.

With 40 years' teaching under her belt and the shadow of her father's religious zealousness looming over her, she regards the exorcism as an intrusion on her professional territory and an indulgence of superstitious faith. In this it is easy to sympathise with her, but she also has something of the indignation of a Daily Mail reader, a reactionary sense of superiority tinged with unspoken racism.

This premise could have led to an issue-based drama in which the merits and challenges of religion, multiculturalism and modern teaching methods were debated and ticked off one by one. But, although Maxwell touches on all of these questions, he labours none of them, preferring instead to pick apart the character of Brodie herself.

Like her namesake in the Muriel Spark novel, she is guilty of the sin of pride, but it is a flaw that covers a much more serious malaise. The deeper she leads us into the story, the more we see her not as the controlled figure of authority but as a vulnerable woman whose dependence on sex and alcohol stems from an abuse similar to that suffered by the Somali girl.

By the end, nothing is as it seems. Not the bright comedy, replaced by gothic horror; not the exorcism, which is more of a benign ritual; and not the actions of Brodie, which don't square with the tabloid description of a "race-hate miss", although they are no less shocking. It makes for a turbulent, unsettling 90 minutes, not least because of the assured swagger and deadpan playfulness of actor Joanna Tope in Johnny McKnight's atmospheric production.

Promises Promises is at the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, on 17 February; OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, Inverness, on 24 March, and Woodend Barn, Banchory, on 25 March, 2010.

© Mark Fisher, 2010

Backbeat, Citizens Theatre preview

Published in Scotland on Sunday

Backbeat preview

RINGO Starr said Backbeat got the sound of The Beatles exactly right. That was a big compliment for Iain Softley, but also a surprising one. The writer and director of the 1994 movie had set out to capture the spirit of the Fab Four in early 1960s Hamburg rather than attempt a note-perfect tribute. For Ringo to say he got it right suggests Softley's instinct was spot on, even though authenticity was never his aim.

"What I wanted was to recreate the impact these guys had on the people that saw them," he says. "We just picked musicians who had a similar attitude – at the time, it was Dave Grohl from Nirvana, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and Mike Mills from REM. The result was that when Pete Best (The Beatles' original drummer] did his documentary, he used our soundtrack as the best indication of how the band sounded. The funny thing was we didn't set out to do that at all."

Softley is taking the same approach to the stage version of the film, which has its world premiere this month at Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre before a hoped-for London transfer. As we approach the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' first trip to the low-life nightclubs of the Reeperbahn, he is aiming to create a sense of the rough-and-ready excitement the band generated, without being too concerned about historical accuracy.

"It's not straitjacketed in history," he says. "It's not trying to be a reproduction, a restaging or a tribute. I've taken the energy and the essence of the story and I've launched the actors and musicians at this idea."

He knows a show like this will depend on the conviction of the musicians, which is why band rehearsals began as long ago as December. It's also why they've been warming up with live appearances at clubs including Glasgow's McChuill's. With sometime Oasis guitarist Paul Stacey as musical director, the creative team is putting everything into perfecting the energy of raw rock'n'roll.

"I went to see them rehearse, it was only the third time they'd played together and they were fantastic," says Isabella Calthorpe, who plays Astrid Kirchherr, the German photographer who captured the heart of original bass player Stuart Sutcliffe in 1960. "I couldn't believe they hadn't been playing together forever to have a real chemistry so early on. It was really exciting."

Softley agrees. "They are a great rock'n'roll band now. Paul Stacey has honed them into a fantastic performing unit. They ripped the place up in their Glasgow gig. The difference between the film and the play is you're in the same room as the guys playing."

The director, however, is quick to point out that Backbeat is no jukebox musical. He chose to launch the show at the Citizens' because of its reputation for straight drama.

Far from being a lightweight sing-along-a-Beatles show, his play focuses on the tragic story of their bass player. Sutcliffe had stunning looks but was no great shakes as a musician and, having fallen in love with Kirchherr, he left the band to pursue his vocation as a painter. It was a vocation cut cruelly short by a fatal brain haemorrhage at only 21.

"At the same time as the electric atmosphere created by the music, the experience is of the dramatic story," says Softley. "It's about the choice Stuart Sutcliffe has to make between his best friend, John Lennon, and his girlfriend, and between rock'n'roll and art."

Coming hot on the heels of Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, about Lennon's childhood – not to mention the hype of The Beatles Rock Band video game – Backbeat is a historical record that can still connect to a young audience. For those familiar with the story, what this retelling offers is an insight into the band's eventual transition from teen sensations to sonic pioneers. Hamburg gave them more than the mop top haircuts that defined their early image. It also gave them a taste for art, not least through their friendship with Kirchherr and her ex-boyfriend Klaus Voormann, who would go on to design the sleeve for Revolver.

"The band was honed in the creative furnace of Hamburg, both musically and in terms of the exposure to the bohemian art world and the ideas of Astrid Kirchherr and her German art school friends," says Softley. "It created the first art band. A few years later they commissioned Peter Blake to do the cover of Sgt Pepper and almost immediately John Lennon was moving away from the idea of being a conventional performing act. The play will show people visually what the world was, but it will feel as if you've gone back in a time machine and it is happening in the present."

Backbeat, Citizens' Theatre, Glasgow, Tuesday until 6 March www.citz.co.uk

© Mark Fisher 2010

Wall of Death, theatre review

Published in The Guardian

Wall of Death: A Way of Life

SECC, Glasgow
4 out of 5

In April, the National Theatre of ­Scotland is staging Peter Pan. If that production is half as ­weightless as the Ken Fox Troupe riding the Wall of Death, it will be breathtaking. ­Harnessing the properties of ­centrifugal force, this ­family of old-school ­entertainers ride their low-slung Indian motorcycles around a vertiginous drum with heart-stopping panache. You will believe a boy can fly.

When they tell you to keep your ­fingers from the edge as you peer into their cylinder down a sheer six-metre wall, you assume it is all part of the end-of-the-pier patter. You can imagine these grungy "vertical riders" as part of the creepy funfair in Something Wicked This Way Comes, and you expect a bit of showbiz hyperbole.

But it is nothing of the kind. In turn, the four riders rev their engines, circle the wall and mock the laws of gravity as they breeze past our noses with a combination of reckless abandon and choreographic grace. This is a show not to be missed.

The event, however, has its ­questions. We all know the NTS is a theatre without walls, but in this ­collaboration with the artist Stephen Skrynka, it is also theatre without actors or playwrights. Despite her credit, Vicky Featherstone is not even a ­director in the usual sense.

This break with convention is part of what makes Wall of Death so ­exciting. If you wanted to get ­theoretical, you could place it in the tradition of the ­Grassmarket Project and Rimini ­Protokoll – companies that put real ­people on stage – but it is enough that the Ken Fox Troupe are just great at what they do.

The production is part of a strand of genre-defying NTS work that includes the rural art installations of Half Life and the country-and-western storytelling of Long Gone Lonesome. The question is not whether this is legitimate ­territory for a theatre company so much as whether the NTS is making the most of the opportunity.

Some aspects of Wall of Death are underdeveloped, as was the case with Long Gone Lonesome. Skrynka, rechristened "Skidmark Steve" for his efforts in learning to ride the Wall of Death, is an endearing but low-key host and, despite his diverting zoetrope sideshow and big-screen interviews, it is the Ken Fox Troupe who are the main event. That event is unquestionably thrilling, but it could have been more exhilarating still with a less earth-bound presentation.

Until Friday. Box office: 0844 395 4000. Then touring.

© Mark Fisher 2010

Birds and Other Things I Am Afraid Of, theatre review

Published in The Guardian

Birds and Other Things I Am Afraid Of
Lansdowne Parish Church, Glasgow
3 out of 5

A site-specific show in a 19th-century church offers lots of ­tantalising possibilities: all those empty pews, echoing galleries and haunted corners. They are not, ­however, ­possibilities that concern Lynda ­Radley, whose one-woman show for Poorboy and the Arches takes place ­almost ­exclusively in a wooden shed ­constructed on the Lansdowne's altar.

After a preamble, in which we get a brief glimpse of a congregation of framed sepia portraits fading into the gloom, she leads the 12-strong audience into the shed, which doubles as the secret junk room in the family home of one Alice Macleod. There are shelves of glass jars, a filing cabinet laden with laundry, boxes of family photographs and an old cassette player – all loaded with clues to a half-remembered past.

The story she tells is as small-scale as the room. On the cusp of ­adulthood and independence, Alice yearns to ­connect with the mother whose funeral she was forbidden to attend as a little girl. With the cautious help of her ­librarian boyfriend, she ­rummages through the mementoes like a ­detective. If she can come to terms with her past, she will have the strength to fly the nest, like the birds that flutter in and out of the story.

It is minor, coming-of-age stuff, but Radley captures the sense of a self-absorbed only child; her sweetly voiced performance has a quirky charm that's enhanced by Sandy Thomson's ­inventive direction. The emotional ­terrain is gentle, however, and the story more particular than universal. That is why the beautiful closing image – in which she releases a balloon up into the church ceiling, as she finally lets go of her childhood – does not resonate with the grandeur the setting deserves.

© Mark Fisher 2010

Chekhov at 150

Published in The Scotsman

Check out Chekhov

THIS week marks Anton Chekhov's 150th birthday. His four major plays – The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, The Seagull and Uncle Vanya – have cemented his status as one of the world's great dramatists.

But in Britain, he is a playwright with a long history of being misunderstood. Over the coming months in Scotland, however, three productions will show how today's directors and translators are determined to present the Russian master in a different light.

The problem goes back to the earliest London productions of his work. The first UK staging of The Cherry Orchard was in 1911, six years after its debut at the Moscow Art Theatre. Like the productions of The Seagull and Uncle Vanya that followed soon after, it was a worthy attempt at engaging with this new Russian voice, but it failed in one crucial respect. It didn't get Chekhov's sense of humour.

Imagine taking the deadpan irony away from Ricky Gervais in The Office and you'll have an idea of why these stagings left audiences puzzled and depressed. A whole generation came to regard Chekhov as a "moody, moping, muddled highbrow", observed one commentator.

Things improved in 1925 when a production of The Cherry Orchard reached London via Oxford. There were still those who found it "dull, stupid stuff" and saw "no reason why this fatuous drivel should be translated at all". They were not typical, however, and there were enough people calling it "flawless" and a "masterpiece" for the production to transfer to a second London theatre and enjoy a run throughout that summer. "Once we knew we were allowed to laugh, of course, everything fell into place and took on meaning," recalled the critic WA Darlington.

But in the course of his review of The Cherry Orchard ("an imperishable masterpiece"), the critic James Agate made a revealing remark. He said he had overheard a woman in the audience complaining that "these Russians have a very un-English way of looking at things". She was voicing a recurring resistance among audiences to anything that did not conform to their own worldview.

Perhaps as a consequence, British productions have had a tendency to vary between two extremes. Some have made Chekhov's world seem very alien, a place of samovars, serfs and impossibly long journeys to Moscow. Others have infused the plays with a very English sense of torpor and wistful longing for the past. Reviewing a production of The Seagull in 1949, one critic observed that the acting was "too English in its reserve" and, as recently as 1996, playwright Howard Barker was touring his own version of Uncle Vanya (in which Vanya's gun hits its target instead of farcically missing), written partly in reaction to the way he thought British audiences found an unhealthy comfort in the inertia of Chekhov's world.

He might have been right in that, but directors had begun to correct the imbalance as early as 1958 thanks to a visit by the Moscow Art Theatre to London. In a typically brilliant review of a Cherry Orchard that blew the "cobwebs off the play", Kenneth Tynan complained about the mood of elegy that Britain liked to impose on Chekhov. "We invest it with a nostalgia for the past which, though it runs right through our culture, is alien to Chekhov's," he wrote.

Director Sean Holmes, whose production of Three Sisters for the Lyric Hammersmith is touring to Edinburgh's Traverse this spring, is less quick to criticise his forebears. "It reflects its time," he says. "Before the new writing revolution of 1956, how could you not do it through the prism of the rest of the theatre that was going on? Chekhov, like Shakespeare, is classical writing; it can take a lot and it reflects the concerns of its age. He was writing at a time of immense social change. He saw the inertia and the corruption and he also saw the possibility of change. Of course, if you do it in Britain afterwards, it's going to be inflected by a sense of the lost age; it'll end up being Edwardian. And some of those productions might have been great for their time."

All the same, in his collaboration with Filter, an experimental theatre company, he has sought to break free of the usual Chekhovian trappings. "We've set it in its world without finding the exact replica of a Saint Stanislav's medal, second class," he says. "Sometimes your energies go into the pursuit of historical accuracy rather than what's going on in the play. With Filter, I want to see the play afresh. Every photo of a Chekhov production has a man in a crushed linen suit. I just wondered if there was a way of starting from somewhere else. Our design is a collection of furniture you might get in a rehearsal room and the costumes are a nod to anything through the 20th century."

John Byrne, celebrated author of The Slab Boys and Tutti Frutti, is not a playwright you could accuse of being too English. His version of The Cherry Orchard for Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum is set in a country house somewhere between Braemar and Pitlochry, where the accents range from colloquial Perthshire to well-to-do landowner. Madam Ranevskaya is now Mrs Ramsay-Mackay.

"The thing that initially appeals to you is the threnody for that whole class humbling," says Byrne, who translated Uncle Vanya as Uncle Varick for a production starring Brian Cox in 2004. "It's a romantic idea and you get so fed up with it because it isn't what he was writing about at all."

His second shift is from turn-of-the-century Russia to our own winter of discontent. In place of the onset of revolution anticipated by Chekhov, we get the first hints of the Thatcher years. The local shop has been turned into a deli and, just like in the original, the land is going to be given over to holiday homes.

"It's the early months of 1979 which gives it a whole context," he says. "They've just had all these train strikes and the train is two hours late getting to Pitlochry. It's not about that, but there's a background of that history and what we've ended up with now. We've inherited the counter-revolution that came through Margaret Thatcher. There were big changes we can recognise historically."

For director Kenny Miller, working for Glasgow's lunchtime theatre, A Play, a Pie and a Pint, will force him to conceive of The Seagull afresh. Not only will he compress the four-act play into an hour in a version by Mary McCluskey, but also he will do it with just four actors.

"I love a challenge," says Miller who has previously directed reduced versions of Romeo and Juliet, and Antony and Cleopatra in the same slot. "When you're doing a show in the classic season for Oran Mor, you have to approach it as a completely new piece. It gives you a more modern way of looking at it."

&149 Three Sisters is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 24-27 March; The Cherry Orchard is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 16 April-8 May; The Seagull is at Oran Mor, Glasgow, in June. The RSAMD is also staging a production of Three Sisters, at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow from 30 March-3 April.

© Mark Fisher 2010

Douglas Maxwell interview

Published in Scotland on Sunday

Interview: Douglas Maxwell, playwright

DOUGLAS Maxwell has a refreshingly honest way of telling you how badly his plays nearly turned out. He spent years, for example, working on a commission from the National Theatre of Scotland only to end up with a 200-page script that was quite unstageable. They described it as more of a novel than a play and, today, he doesn't even think it would have made much of a novel.

"It was a tome," laughs the Ayrshire-born playwright, who had already ditched a version inspired by Derren Brown-style magic. "I had a little piece of paper on my computer that said 'grand'. I wanted it to be a grand, national play. It turns out I can't do grand."

By the time he had got to that point, however, the fee from the NTS was in the bank. The thought of earning money from a play that wasn't even staged unsettled him. "They paid me in full and it had the opposite effect that you might think," he says. "I felt guilty that I hadn't done the work I was paid for. The guilt got to me and I went back to it. The word 'grand' came off the computer and 'pop' came on. It was not Girls Aloud pop, but Martha and the Vandellas pop. Undoubtedly pop, but really good."

Opening in March, the all-new version of the play, The Miracle Man, is "a two hour, 15 minute pop epic" about a hapless teacher, the laughing stock of his school, who is in urgent need of a miracle.

Despite the rocky journey, Maxwell himself appears to be in no such need. In 2010, his star is in the ascendant. The Miracle Man is only one of at least five plays being staged this year. Later in the spring, Grid Iron will revive his Fringe First-winning hit Decky Does A Bronco, performed in a real-life playground, for its tenth anniversary. He's also written a play, Too Fast, for the National Theatre in London, and is working on a musical for Cumbernauld Theatre called The Bookie. "It's a story that Gilbert and Sullivan would have had dramaturgical problems with – it's preposterous," says Maxwell, who set up a musicals society when he was at Stirling University.

"It's about a bookie who has been taking bets on real-life things, like betting on your daughter passing all her exams or betting on falling in love. He calls them lifestyle bets and business is booming. The dead brother of the owner has left one of these bets involving everyone in the play and the owner stays in town to make sure it doesn't pan out. The others get together to make sure it does pan out. I don't think it's ruining anything to say it pans out."

Before all that comes Promises Promises, a one-woman show starring Joanna Tope and produced by Random Accomplice for a UK tour – another commission that didn't go to plan. "They originally commissioned me to do a comedy," he says. "I sat down to write this thing that was going to be called Humbug, which I wanted to be like 1001 Arabian Nights where someone tells a story and in that story someone tells another story. But it didn't work. I spent months on it and it was just dead. They were ten B-side ideas that never congealed into a big idea."

Instead, Maxwell offered director Johnny McKnight a monologue he had written to please himself. It was a bit of a gamble as he hadn't intended anyone to see it, but McKnight loved it. "It's been relatively straightforward and it's not wildly different from that first draft," says Maxwell.

Inspired by the experience of a friend who was teaching at a school in London, Promises Promises is about a supply teacher whose class includes a six-year-old Somali girl who refuses to speak. To the teacher's horror, she learns that community leaders have decided the girl is possessed by devils and must be subjected to a traditional exorcism cure. The teacher, meanwhile, has problems of her own, having been forced to retire in disgrace from her full-time job. The monologue plays out somewhere between edge-of-your-seat thriller and dark horror.

"Although my story goes off in a gothic direction, I don't think it's anywhere near as mental as the true story," says Maxwell, who has avoided making any big statements about multiculturalism or the education system. "There will be a reasonable local authority explanation about why it happened, but I'm much more interested in the woman telling the story."

It is a change of pace for the playwright, best known for his witty coming-of-age comedies. It wasn't deliberate, says Maxwell, it's just his previous writing in this vein has tended not to be produced. "It's pretty dark," he says. "But you don't really have any control over which of your plays work and which don't. In between Our Bad Magnet, which was ten years ago, and now, there have been lots that aren't about teenage boys in Ayrshire, but those are the ones that stick. I don't think this is radically different, but it feels different from what people have seen."

If there is a link that connects Promises Promises to the wealth of Maxwell's work on show this year as well as earlier plays such as Helmet, Mancub and Melody, it is his belief in storytelling. A keen theatre-goer, he enjoys watching the artistic experiments of others, but when it comes to putting his own pen to paper, he is determined to hook the audience through the power of narrative.

"If you get someone walking on stage and saying, 'You'll not believe what's happened…' you'll have the audience," he says. 'For me, theatre is a storytelling form, rather than a sharing or a political act. You can't really help the way your work turns out and for me it is narrative, even though you don't really need a narrative in theatre for a play to work – a back-story is more important than the story very often. But somebody telling a story does work for me."

Promises Promises opens at the Tron, Glasgow, 3-6 February, then tours. The Miracle Man, Tron, 18-20 March, then on tour. Decky Does A Bronco, Too Fast and The Bookie follow later in the year

© Mark Fisher 2010

The Price, Royal Lyceum Theatre review

Published in The Guardian

The Price

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
4 out of 5

Fred Goodwin, the poster boy for the banking crisis, has just landed a high-flying job with an Edinburgh architectural firm. Not everyone is as fortunate as the former RBS chief executive. Some, like the dead father whose memory hangs heavy over Arthur Miller's The Price, lost millions in the Wall Street crash and, in the face of the Great Depression, never recovered. The question Miller poses is how to respond to such a calamity: should we fight egotistically for our own success or should we retrench to the old values of love, trust and selflessness?

It's a dialectic that takes flight in the second half of the play when stay-at-home Victor, who has settled for a job as a police officer rather than fulfil his promise as a scientist, meets his estranged brother Walter, a surgeon who has made a fortune developing and selling nursing homes. Having loaded our sympathy towards Victor, whose ineffectuality has an everyday charm, Miller presents Walter as a self-made man who has refused to romanticise their father's fall. Bright and confident, he makes Victor's dedication to their father seem more pathetic than noble.

In these scenes, John Dove's ­production takes a mesmerising hold. If you can't imagine Greg Powrie's Victor as a former star pupil, he is convincing as a downtrodden man doing the decent thing as his life slips by. In contrast, Aden Gillett's Walter is tall, liberated and radiant, a seductive advert for free-market ambition, despite the breakdown of his marriage and mental health.

His charisma makes Victor's decision to stick to his principles seem as much a gesture of defiance as the victory his name suggests. For that reason, the play lacks the emotional punch of other Miller classics; but it remains a pertinent analysis of our unhealthy love of ­possessions, profit and shopping.

© Mark Fisher 2010

John Dove interview about Arthur Miller's The Price

Published in The Scotsman

John Dove interview

THE Royal Lyceum Theatre's rehearsal room is a big, airy space, but this afternoon it is looking unusually cluttered. Standing in the middle of it is a wardrobe, with a model ship perched on top; beside it, on the floor, a harp next to a wind-up gramophone player. Among the other bits and pieces is a small rocking horse. Sitting on the sidelines, director John Dove looks dreamily on. "It's a masterpiece," he says. "You would never miss a chance to work on a thing like this in a million years."

He is talking about The Price, Arthur Miller's powerful 1968 drama, which is set in the attic of a New York brownstone, amid the clutter of a dead man's life. In a day or two, all this paraphernalia – and a good deal more besides – will be moving over the road to the Lyceum's stage, so Dove's four-strong company can enact the story of two estranged brothers trying to make sense of the loss of their father. One of them, Victor, has dedicated years to caring for the old man, a victim of the Wall Street crash of 1929. The other, Walter, has pursued his career as a doctor with a different kind of single-mindedness. With typical Miller thorniness, the play teases the audience about which course of action was best.

To have Dove back in the Edinburgh theatre is good news. This is his fourth Arthur Miller play here and his track record is exemplary. He came first – at the invitation of artistic director Mark Thomson, who had worked with him at Hampstead Theatre – with a production of Death of a Salesman in 2004. The show had a fierce emotional momentum, the 11-strong cast was flawless and Paul Jesson's fantastic turn as Willy Loman earned him a nomination for best actor in the Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland.

In 2007 – after an admirable staging of Les Liaisons Dangereuses – Dove was back with that other Miller classic, All My Sons. His superb production tuned in to the timely theme of big business profiting from war, but hit home most profoundly because of its emotional plea for social responsibility. Then, last year, he proved he could be just as persuasive with The Man Who Had All The Luck, an early Miller play whose classic status is far from assured (it lasted three days on Broadway) and yet here came across as compelling, funny and brimming with ideas.

"Miller puts people – whether they are intelligent or not intelligent – in a situation which is such a shock that they are robbed of intelligence," says Dove. "That's when an audience will get interested. The most interesting moment to see a human being is when they don't know what to do, because we all have that in life. Arthur is massively compassionate about people who have lost the map."

The pairing of Dove and Miller seems such a good match that it is surprising their relationship began as recently as Death of a Salesman. Perhaps it is modesty, but the director attributes much of the success, not to his own skills, but to the people of Edinburgh who, for whatever reason, seem to embrace Miller with particular enthusiasm. "With Death of a Salesman, I got a real feeling that the audience loved the heart of it," he says. "That relationship between Arthur and the Edinburgh audience is so fulfilling that we kept getting tempted to come back with another one. We seemed to get the same response from the Edinburgh people each time. It speaks to them. You can't necessarily say why. I was there when one of Arthur's plays went on at Hampstead and the relationship had no real feeling. It wasn't a reflection on the production; it's something in the air."

Miller, who died in 2005, is not exactly short of admirers elsewhere, but if Dove is right, it will be fascinating to see what nerves The Price strikes in a city so deeply affected by the banking crisis. The play's dead father, Gregory Solomon, was a victim of the financial system he hoped to profit by, a system that was part of the go-getting American Dream. Does such a man deserve our sympathy or contempt?

It is a question we could ask of today's financiers. "All of that is there," says Dove. "Walter says, 'So why did he need looking after? There's how many million people – they've all gone bust – why couldn't he go on welfare?' All the issues of today come out. Of course, it's the American Dream crashing, but our dream did, too, last year. Should we be supporting our dads if their pension has lost its value? Where's the responsibility? Arthur really brings both sides out."

If that theme does strike a chord, it will be down to the audience, not the production. Dove feels it is his job not to underscore the topical resonances, as if winking to the audience, but almost to disappear into the work, allowing its archetypal dramatic forces to work on us unencumbered. "You've got to have a clear idea, but keep it very simple and keep your head down," he says.

The director divides his career between new plays and classics. On the one hand, he has specialised in premières, spending 13 years working with living playwrights at Hampstead Theatre and now teaming up with Howard Brenton for a play about the making of the King James Bible. On the other, he has focused on the greats, such as a Measure for Measure he did with Mark Rylance at the Globe Theatre, on Broadway and also in Broadmoor. "With the giants, they find the simple in humanity, and at that point everybody turns round and looks," he says. "When we took Measure for Measure to Broadmoor, we had a man playing a woman trying to argue for her brother's life. There were three women inmates with three guards around each one and they were all following it. I couldn't believe this writer had hooked those women with a man playing a woman four centuries later."

The secret of his success with Miller, he suggests, is his determination to make every action seem unpremeditated. The playwright can come across as mechanistic if the characters appear to be mouthpieces of a particular ideological line. The way to avoid that, says Dove, is for the actors to lead with the heart and not the head.

"When they're playing every line as though they've no idea what's going to happen next, you don't get a feeling of Miller controlling at all," says Dove, who hopes one day to stage Miller's A View From the Bridge. "It has to come off the top of the head. You've got to get rid of intellect. The lines have got to be spontaneous, otherwise it will sound like a ploy by the author. If you hit it right and the actors have backed off, it's almost as if Miller is talking with the audience. Life becomes really possible when people are being surprised, either as writers or actors or the relationship between the writer and the audience. If there's surprise in the air, everything is possible."

• The Price is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, from tonight until 13 February.

© Mark Fisher 2010

Dancing to Ivor Cutler, Off Kilter preview

Published in The Guardian

Ivor Cutler's songs lift Scottish dance

One weekend last summer, Ashley Page was sitting at home playing some CDs. The choreographer credited with revitalising Scottish Ballet was searching for some music to slot into Off Kilter, a show celebrating Scottish dance. He had, perhaps unsurprisingly, ruled out Hebridean psalms. "They did nothing for me in terms of choreography," he says. So he put on Ludo, a 1967 album of strange songs and poems by the late cult poet Ivor Cutler.

"My kids were hysterical," he recalls. "They were saying, 'What's this?' It became a family favourite. We were almost sick of hearing it." Glasgow-born Cutler, who found an odd sort of fame after playing the bus conductor in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour, was a hero to everyone from John Peel to the philosopher Bertrand Russell; more recently, he was the inspiration behind Franz Ferdinand's song Jacqueline.

Page, a former Royal Ballet principal dancer, began working on a sequence of eight songs from Ludo that somehow fuse humour and jazz, many of them powered by a pedal-driven harmonium. He concentrated on the more upbeat numbers, songs such as Cockadoodledon't and Good Morning! How Are You? Shut Up! This means Page's dancers have the rare experience of counting out time to a man singing about his "granny at the pictures biting all the buttons off the seats". Off Kilter, now touring, received its premiere in Edinburgh during the Hogmanay festivities, where audiences guffawed their approval at Paisley Patter, as the Cutler work is called.

It all sounds very unlikely, this union between a cult Glasgow poet, who died in 2006, and a choreographer with an OBE. But Page says we should not underestimate Cutler's skill as a musician. Produced by George Martin and performed by the Ivor Cutler Trio, Ludo is the most musical of his albums, with fewer of the spoken-word tracks that characterise favourites such as Jammy Smears and Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Volume 2. Listen closely to Culter's hilarious tales of shoplifters lifting shops and astronauts dealing with dirty trousers, and you can hear the influence of everything from Calvinist hymns to calypso, from Middle Eastern chants to boogie-woogie.

"It's infectious, danceable music," says Page. "You laugh spontaneously because he's made it sound like he just sat down at the piano and knocked this thing out. One song repeats its verse three times, but the second time, instead of being two phrases of eight, it is an eight and a seven. It took me ages to work out why I couldn't make it fit."

To turn it all into a work for three dancers, Page took inspiration from a rhythm here, a phrase there, taking care to reflect Cutler's exuberant spirit while avoiding anything self-consciously comic. Sometimes he took the lyrics literally, turning the bucolic I'm Going in a Field (a hymn-like paean to lying in the grass with a lover) into a romantic duet. Other times, he let the music lead the way: the dancers make woodpecker movements to the woodblock tap of A Great Grey Grasshopper, a stream-of-consciousness fantasy that starts with a grasshopper leaving a mark on Cutler's trousers and ends up with Martians in space.

Performed in front of Oscar Marzaroli's famous black-and-white images of deprived 1960s Glasgow (featuring lots of knobbly-kneed boys in shorts playing in the streets), Page's 13-minute sequence has the odd effect of creating nostalgia, not for a happier time, but for one that certainly seems more eccentric, if not downright bonkers. It is one of the highlights of Off Kilter, the other being a world premiere of Cease Your Funning by New York wunderkind Mark Morris, set to some of the Scottish songs written by Beethoven between 1815 and 1818, using the words of Robert Burns and William Smyth. "There's a great drinking song in it called Sally in our Alley," says Morag Deyes, Off Kilter's mastermind. "It's very Germanic, but also quite balletic, delicate and pastoral."

Paisley Patter isn't the only work to take its inspiration from a rather unlikely source: the bill also features a piece inspired by Archie Gemmill's spectacular goal for Scotland against the Netherlands in the 1978 World Cup. Choreographed by Andy Howitt of YDance, the four-man work focuses on what is regarded by many as one of the greatest goals ever. "It's a four-minute piece based on the moves Gemmill made," says Deyes. "In the 70s, they didn't have multi-camera filming, but now we can see it from all these different angles. He curved his leg around, moved through, then ends up as this triumphal moment – fist in the air and head up."

Off Kilter, a defiant rejection of cultural stereotypes, has set its sights on the international market, with early interest from North America and China, so the Ivor Cutler dance could go global. "It's nice not to do an ultra-serious thing," says Page. "But what I've given the dancers to do is really hard – they're not just having fun."

© Mark Fisher 2010

Curtain Up: 40 Years of Scottish Theatre exhibition preview

Published in The Scotsman


The National Library of Scotland aims to bring back memories of Scottish theatre with new exhibition - Curtain Up: 40 years of Scottish Theatre


We're standing in a storage room a few floors down in a secret corner of Edinburgh's National Library of Scotland. It's full of musty box files, metal shelving and neatly catalogued CDs. But that's not the whole story. In the middle of the low-ceilinged room, hanging from an empty shelf, there are two dresses in vibrant 1950s colours, and a regal off-white gown that could have been worn by Elizabeth I. There's even a ruff lying in a nearby plastic bag.

Just along the row, Sally Harrower, the library's manuscripts curator, is running her hand over a gold lamé kilt. "Alan Cumming," she says dreamily.

It is indeed the same gold lamé kilt sported by the Aberfeldy-born Hollywood and Broadway star when he appeared in the National Theatre of Scotland's production of The Bacchae in 2007. It was this very piece of fabric that flapped down provocatively to reveal the actor's bare buttocks as he made his entrance from above, head first, a particularly cheeky god descending from the heavens. Righting his matching gold lamé jacket, he paused, grinned to the stalls and said, "So Thebes, I'm back."

Today the outfit looks incongruous beneath the exposed pipes of the manuscript strongroom, but soon it will be united with a host of other such theatrical memorabilia from the library's archives in Curtain Up, an exhibition to celebrate 40 years of Scottish theatre. The nearby dresses are from the Traverse Theatre's 2003 revival of John Byrne's The Slab Boys, while the regal gown is the one worn by Siobhan Redmond playing Elizabeth in the National Theatre of Scotland's Mary Stuart in 2006. "Our strongrooms have never looked so glamorous," says Harrower.

They are all part of a display that will take us from the socialist rallying cry of 7:84's The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil to the world-conquering Iraq drama of Black Watch in 2006. In six "scenes" it tells a story of the plays, playwrights, actors and crew who have made Scottish theatre the formidable force it is today.

On the shelf behind Harrower is a collection of oddities: the gnarled wooden monster, half-baby, half-tree, of Vanishing Point's Little Otik; a designer's set model for Desire Under the Elms at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow; a soldier's combat fatigues from Black Watch; and a wolf puppet from The Wolves in the Walls, both by the National Theatre of Scotland. Opening a folder of archive material, she discovers the perfect last-minute addition to the exhibition: a publicity photograph from a 1991 production of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui featuring a fresh-faced David Tennant and an equally radiant Ashley Jensen mugging for the camera with their heads positioned among a sea of cauliflowers. "We could use that in scene six," says Andrew Martin, curator of modern Scottish collections and co-curator of the exhibition.

Harrower bends down and hands me a 7:84 badge from an envelope stuffed with the things. She has more than she knows what to do with. The National Library of Scotland is home to the company's official archive, which is why, as well as the publications and scripts you would expect to find in a library, Harrower is responsible for all manner of theatre ephemera. She shows me the company ledger from the 1973 tour of The Cheviot … with the names of director John McGrath and actors Bill Paterson, John Bett and Alex Norton neatly written in ink, all of them earning an egalitarian £20 a week although, because of some quirk in the tax law, the women paid a few pennies' less tax than the men.

Earlier this year she took the final delivery of material from 7:84, which called it a day after more than 30 years of left-wing flag-flying, having lost its funding from the Scottish Arts Council. "That was a really sad day for me," she says. "All these odds and ends came in, like a great bag of badges – because they were a very badgey company – and a marching banner."

An even less likely thing to find in a library's store is the original set for The Cheviot … which, unsurprisingly, does not fit on the bookshelves and causes raised eyebrows from other curators. Designed and painted by John Byrne – and kept in working order by stage manager-cum-fiddler Allan Ross – the set was made from strengthened cardboard and conceived as a giant pop-up book with new scenes emerging with each turn of the page. At 8ft x 10ft, it was the right size to squeeze onto the stages of village halls on its pioneering Highland tours. It will take pride of place in the exhibition after a spell with the library's conservation team.

"The Cheviot … was the major theatrical moment of my life," says Bill Paterson. "It made an impact on all our lives." For that reason, the play is the perfect place to begin the exhibition's survey of four decades of Scottish theatre, just as Gregory Burke's Black Watch is the perfect place to end it. The two plays were landmarks, not just in Scotland but around the world. Certainly, the influence of McGrath's play has been profound, both in its political content and artistic form. Described on the original posters as "a ceilidh play with scenes, songs and music of Highland history from the Clearances to the oil strike," it dramatised the history of capitalist exploitation in the Highlands, but it did so in a way that had more in common with music hall and folk traditions than with conventional theatre.

From there, Curtain Up takes us through a series of thematic stages, covering the playwrights, the major theatres, the representations of Scotland on stage, the country's international reach and the development of the National Theatre of Scotland. The library's second major theatrical archive comes from the Traverse, the Edinburgh institution that has been promoting new plays since 1963. Harrower is responsible not only for the produced scripts plus associated photographs and paraphernalia (such as the black bonnets worn by the actors in Sue Glover's 1991 international hit Bondagers and the old Traverse Theatre sign from its days in the Grassmarket), but also for the welter of unsolicited manuscripts that have come the theatre's way. In total, she has catalogued 3,000 scripts and reckons she still has as many again to work through.

One of the challenges facing Harrower and Martin has been to capture a sense of the theatre even though, as an artform, it is built to be ephemeral. The scripts, images, newspaper cuttings, ticket stubs, programmes and costumes evoke the activity of the stage, but they are merely echoes of the living and breathing actors whom, as Shakespeare said, are now "all spirits … melted into air".

The impact of the theatre is easier to capture, however. You can see it, for example, in the letters written by theatregoers to the 7:84 company after witnessing the energy, excitement and polemics of The Cheviot …. "I couldn't say a word of thanks to you yesterday, because I was afraid I should burst into tears," writes one correspondent. "I realised that feeling strongly about this situation, no matter how sincere you are, isn't enough and I wondered what kind of positive action I could take," asks another.

You can also see it in Scottish theatre's ability to reach out across the world. Theatregoers at home often have little sense of how well Scottish plays have travelled, but in the last few weeks alone, there has been a production of David Harrower's Knives in Hens in Dublin, another of his Blackbird in Pittsburgh, one of Liz Lochhead's Good Things in Texas and another of Anthony Neilson's The Wonderful World of Dissocia in Boston (the polar bear toy from the original Edinburgh International Festival production is on show here, as well as a copy of the script in Portuguese). "I don't think people realise that David Greig and David Harrower are names that mean something in London and beyond," says Martin.

As successes go, there has been none more high-profile than Black Watch, which stormed the Edinburgh Fringe of 2006 before a tour of duty that took in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Wellington, Toronto and London. It put the National Theatre of Scotland on the map in its inaugural year and served as a vindication for all those who had campaigned for such a body since the early years of the 19th century. "We end with Black Watch as an example of a big success," says Martin. "The exhibition was a good opportunity to exploit Sally's archives. I think people will be surprised that we've got a lot of this material. It will look very eye-catching and dramatic."

Curtain Up: 40 years of Scottish theatre, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, 19 December - 3 May 2010.

© Mark Fisher 2009

Sleeping Beauty, MacRobert Arts Centre review

Published in The Guardian

Sleeping Beauty

Macrobert, Stirling
3 out of 5

Is it Stirling's central location that makes its panto such an amalgam? Or is it that writer Johnny McKnight has a magpie appetite for good ideas, whatever their provenance? Either way, Sleeping Beauty looks broadly for inspiration and, panto being the bastard artform it is, comes out looking bright and distinctive in its own right.

From the Christmas shows of Stuart Paterson, it takes a respect for narrative and an appreciation of character. From the postmodern pantos of Glasgow's Tron, it takes the idea that those characters are always likely to wander off stage and into another show in the pantosphere. From the annual spectacular at the Glasgow King's, it takes the "Hiya, pals" camaraderie developed by actor Gerard Kelly and fashions it into the short-trousered shape of Ross Allan. Throw in the Citizens Theatre glamour of designer Kenny Miller and McKnight's love of pop culture, and you have a healthy hybrid that nods to tradition without being bound by it.

The mix can be uneven. Portraying Sleeping Beauty's mother as a fame-hungry narcissist scores on laughs and topical satire, but it makes her look no better than the bad fairy, who has at least got a justifiable grievance. And by turning the good fairy into the dame, McKnight rules out the possibility of any serious moral battle.

But what it lacks in consistency, the show makes up for in raucous energy. With an unbecoming Kylie fixation – outsize hot pants and all – McKnight is a brilliantly abrasive dame, brimming with infectious good humour and off-the-cuff ribaldry, and still capable of pulling off a smoochy, half-tempo I Should Be So Lucky.

He makes it look like so much riotous nonsense, yet the final-curtain union between Charlene Boyd's Beauty and Ross Allan's Jester is truly touching, a testament to the careful plotting that has gone on behind the fun and flamboyance.

Until 31 December. Box office: 01786 466666.

© Mark Fisher 2009

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

Cinderella, Citizens Theatre review

Published in The Guardian


Cinderella

Citizens, Glasgow

4 out of 5

Most archetypal stories keep their psychological significance buried beneath the surface. Not so this Cinderella. As playwright Alan McHugh has it, this is a tale about the need for a good mother. And to underline the point, the mother shows up from beyond the grave.

Like every Cinderella, Helen McAlpine has to cope with a domestic imbalance. Her stepmother verges on the psychotic; her stepsisters are preening narcissists; and her father is either absent or ineffectual. Nothing is as it should be, apart from Cinderella, whose turn-the-other-cheek goodness stops just short of passive-aggressive. "Why are you so nice to us?" asks one of the stepsisters, mystified.

What is different here, however, is that Angelica, the fairy godmother, is not a fairy at all. Instead, she is the fading ghost of Cinderella's own mother, unable to find peace until her daughter and husband are content. She represents not simply good fortune, but a symbol of the moral qualities absent in her daughter's life.

It means the union between Cinder-ella and her prince is less a fluke win for the servant girl than a victory for the maternal values of nurture and love. It's what makes the conclusion of Jeremy Raison's production so affecting, even as Cara Kelly's wicked stepmother gets her eyes pecked out by crows.

It sounds maudlin, but the children are too hooked on the storytelling to notice the darker strands and, although some of the comedy falls flat, it is a lively and inventive production. With a lush, romantic live score by Claire McKenzie and a gorgeous circular set of Freudian doors opening onto a dark and dangerous wood by Jason Southgate, it is as sober as it is nourishing.

© Mark Fisher 2009

Robinson Crusoe and the Caribbean Pirates, King's Theatre, Edinburgh, review

Published in The Guardian


Robinson Crusoe and the Caribbean Pirates

King's, Edinburgh
4 out of 5

Allan Stewart and Grant Stott in Robinson Crusoe and the Caribbean Pirates at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh. Photograph: Douglas Robertson

For many years, the King's fielded an invincible panto double act in the shape of Allan Stewart, the consummate everywoman dame, and Andy Gray, a hangdog foil with a genius for working the crowd. Gray's departure a couple of years ago (this season, he's at Glasgow's Oran Mór) left Stewart carrying the show. If anything, he was too capable of this, exerting such control that he even ended up in the cave with Aladdin, which kept the laughs coming but negated the point of the boy's coming-of-age story.

Happily – and, indeed, hilariously – order has been restored in Robinson Crusoe, a thoroughly enjoyable romp that, barring an out-of-place appearance from the dog in the Churchill Insurance adverts, gets everything right.

There is no doubt Stewart is still the star. He is a man so comfortable in a woman's skin – neither camping it up nor sending it up – that it seems genuinely odd when two excited children in the audience refer to him as "him", prompting a rally of funny "him/her" ad libs from the cast. Whether he is imitating Susan Boyle, getting his mouth around a potentially filthy tongue-twister or rattling out corny puns, you are always delighted to see him on stage.

But there are two more reasons this show works so well. One is the healthy quotient of topical gags, which, in Edinburgh, means a broadside against the city's interminable tram works and wisecracks about Tiger Woods.

The other is the strength of the cast. Grant Stott is looking more comfortable than ever as Blackheart the Pirate, Jo Freer makes a feisty, fast-talking mermaid, Johnny Mac strikes a funny balance between fall guy and romantic lead, and even Charlie Cairoli's old-school clowning adds to the surreal fun.

© Mark Fisher 2009

Ya Beauty and the Beast, Tron Theatre review

Published in The Guardian


Ya Beauty and the Beast

Tron, Glasgow
3 out of 5

There was a time when you could attribute the Tron panto's usual blend of the traditional and the ironic to the postmodern sensibilities of writers Fletcher Mathers and Gordon Dougall. But today, the word "postmodern" no longer does its panto justice. It's as if it has been sucked into a black hole, thrown out the other side, and reconfigured in its own eccentric universe. Panto has eaten itself and Ya Beauty and the Beast is the result.

"If only I were a feminist instead of a panto principal girl, maybe I would be able to understand it all," deadpans the excellent Sally Reid, but she is not the only one struggling to keep up with this warped reworking of the myth. The plot involves a pansy who is losing her petals, an eager-to-please kangaroo, a circus with naff novelty acts, a girl who is turned into a dog, and a shark-driven race across the sea. The romance, such as it is, turns out to be between Andy Clark's hard-as-nails dame, Bunty Beautox (aka Ya Beauty) and George Drennan's cursed monster Barfolemew Beastie.

I'm not even sure if the internal logic holds up in any of this, but it is staged with such irrepressible good humour – terrible puns and all – that it hardly matters. In previous years, the songs have been funnier, the sets more striking and the meta-panto satire more subversive, so the final curtain decision to put the show to bed for a 100 years is sad but probably wise. All the same, I've put a date in my diary for December 2109.

© Mark Fisher 2009

Interview: Julie Brown on Little Red Riding Hood

Published n The Scotsman

Little Red Riding Hood

THE books we read as young children live to haunt us. Even if we forget the stories, we can never quite shake off the intense feelings evoked by the pictures. That is certainly the case with Julie Brown, who, as soon as she was invited to direct Little Red Riding Hood at Glasgow's Arches Theatre, thought back to her formative Ladybird "easy reading" book and its pictures of the girl in the gingham dress and red cloak, basket over her arm, being tempted by a wolf, half-playful, half-sinister.

"I still have all my Ladybird books from when I was wee," says Brown in a rehearsal break. "My mum and dad kept them all for me. So when Little Red Riding Hood was decided upon, I looked out my old books – I'd obviously been playing libraries at some point because they had library cards in them – and, as soon as I started to leaf through the book again, it was the pictures that I remembered. I knew what was coming next. It was the colour and the atmosphere from the images that I remembered."

It was that kind of visual intensity she wanted to recreate in her adaptation of the story for the Arches Christmas show, which she is directing for the first time, having acted in the subterranean theatre's productions of The Water Babies, Hansel and Gretel and The Little Mermaid in previous years. Working with designer Hazel Blue, she is transforming the whole theatre space, almost as if it were an art installation.

"I was remembering that colourful visual element that the original Ladybird books had for me when I was a child," she says. "Hazel and I both realised we wanted to have the sense of a real fable and to envelop the studio space. I was really keen that, from the moment you enter the doorway of the studio, you've crossed into this other place. As you come in you will pass through Little Red Riding Hood's house. Visually, it was about finding something stimulating, bright and not too naturalistic to give it the sense that this is a story that we're telling."

For the text, she turned not to the Ladybird book, but to the Brothers Grimm version, although, mindful of a target audience that ranges from three and up, she has been careful not to let things get too frightening. Natalie McConnon, fresh from her acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe performance as Sandy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, will guide the audience into the woods in the title role, as she sets out to see Mary Gapinski as the sick granny. Playing the big bad wolf, Aly Macrae will wear his grizzly mask on his head – Lion King-style – to reassure younger viewers he is only an actor, although Brown is giving him leeway to get more creepy if he senses the audience can take it.

"I felt it was important that we still had that element of fright and scare in there, not wanting to dumb down, but just being aware of who it's for," she says, adding that McRae has also written the music, which will be performed live by the actors. "Although the wolf is sinister and wicked, we're giving him more of a sense of fun and play, so that our younger audiences can still listen to what he's saying and go on the journey with him without being perturbed by how he looks and what he's about to do to granny. But, physically, we can change it so that if our audience are older and he gets the sense that we're fine, he can change his physicality so that we only see the wolf. If it's a younger audience, we can always remind them, it's OK, there's only an actor here."

For the rest of the year, Brown is one half on the team behind touring theatre company Random Accomplice – the other half being Johnny McKnight, who is playing the dame in the MacRobert's Sleeping Beauty this season – and she is known for creating raucously funny shows that refuse to take themselves too seriously. She has carried that sense of fun into the rehearsal room, although she is being careful not to forget the seriousness of Little Red Riding Hood.

"There's always a lovely vibe in rehearsals at this time of year," she says. "When we're in the rehearsal room, we're just playing with the words and enjoying the story again. I can bring the Random Accomplice element of fun into the rehearsal room, not being afraid to try things out. So there will be elements of daft humour in the show, yes, but I don't want it to be farcical or panto-like. I want to stick to the traditional fable and the telling of the story."

• Little Red Riding Hood is at the Arches, Glasgow, from tomorrow until 3 January

© Mark Fisher 2009

Peter Pan, Royal Lyceum theatre review

Published in The Guardian

Peter Pan

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
4 out of 5

Peter Pan is the only play where the pre-show announcement about switching off watch alarms applies as much to the characters as it does the audience. One too many ticking clocks and the time-sensitive Captain Hook will be forced to leap overboard.

Here, the message is read out very sweetly by the children of composer Philip Pinsky, just as the colourful front cloth and the Chinese dragon-style crocodile are the work of two youngsters who share a surname with designer Francis O'Connor. It's an entertaining touch and a reminder that, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the playwright's birth, JM Barrie's 1904 classic offers a vision of childhood from the perspective of the young as well as the old.

Nowhere is this tension more keenly felt than in the relationship between Peter and Wendy. In Jemima Levick's lively production, Scott Fletcher portrays the boy who wouldn't grow up with a complete absence of self-reflection. That he has no memory of the past and no interest in the future is expected. More surprising is that he shows only the scantest awareness of the present. No time for the thigh-slapping enjoyment of living in the moment: he just gets on with his adventures as if in a dream-like void.

Kim Gerard's Wendy, by contrast, is aching to make the transition from childhood to sexual maturity. She is less delighted by Peter's antics than impatient for them to come to an end. His is a world she is leaving behind – flying, pirates, mermaids and all – and what makes the final sequence so touching is the conflict between her understanding that time moves on and his innocent belief that childhood lasts for ever.

It is a good-looking production – all skewed angles, outsize furniture and a fair amount of magical flying – in which the actors deliver sections of Barrie's elaborate stage directions as well as their lines to give the show a story-telling flavour. The most striking departure from tradition is Samuel Dutton's interpretation of Tinker Bell as a wild commedia dell'arte-style sprite, complete with walking boots, tutu and flying goggles, who talks in gobbledegook, shattering every memory of Disney schmaltz. If it diminishes the force of the usually touching scene in which the audience wills the poisoned fairy back to life, it gives the production a ribald energy that does much to counter Barrie's sentimental streak.

Until 3 January. Box office: 0131-248 4848.

© 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

Interview: Johnny McKnight, pantomime dame

Published in The Scotsman

Johnny McKnight in Sleeping Beauty

IF YOU'RE planning on seeing Sleeping Beauty at Stirling's MacRobert this season – and all the omens suggest you should – don't set too much store by the advertised running time. Last year's festive offering, Mother Goose, lasted anything between two hours and two hours 40 minutes depending on how carried away writer and star Johnny McKnight became during any given performance.

"I got into a wee bit of trouble for that," laughs McKnight who, at 32, is at the vanguard of a new generation of great Scottish dames. "The longest show was when I caught two wee wifies on a matinee with a bottle of vodka in their bag, literally mid-pour. You can't not rip them apart for a whole show. That's what makes the show: wee Ina and Betty sitting there half-cut on a Monday afternoon at one o'clock. I love that."

It sounds a riot, but if the Ayrshire-born McKnight has blossomed into what last year The Scotsman called "a sparkling new Scottish panto star", it was far from inevitable. For a start, the teenage McKnight was nearly put off panto for life by a spot of exuberant audience participation on a P7 theatre trip to the Ayr Gaiety. "I remember the two dames coming into the audience to get somebody up and I was terrified," he says.

Then, having developed an interest in theatre in spite of this formative trauma, he went on to take a place on the RSAMD's contemporary performance practice course – a programme better known for turning out avant garde experimenters than mainstream dames. "When we came out of drama school, we thought we were going to be pure radical live artists," he says. "We did shows with baked beans, if I remember right."

Things might have continued along the same leftfield path, with McKnight and fellow graduate Julie Brown running their own small company Random Accomplice, had director Andy Arnold not spotted his potential as a cross-dressing leading lady when he met him at an interview for the Arches Theatre's directors' scheme. "I thought, 'Should I be insulted by that?'" he laughs.

A season as an Ugly Sister at Loch Lomond gave him a taste for the panto life and, after a series of shows in Dunfermline working with Tony Roper, he joined the cast of The Wizard of Oz in Stirling. "I played the lion like a dame," he says. "I think that's the only character I'm able to play: myself and myself with stilettos on."

Before he knew it, though, he was running the whole show. Sleeping Beauty is his fourth MacRobert panto as dame and his third as writer. They have been successful enough to travel: this season, the Byre Theatre in St Andrews is doing his Mother Goose and Platform in Easterhouse is doing his Cinderella. "I did a performance course where you learn to play yourself and that's quite handy being a dame," he says. "The dame's not unlike me and I'm quite good at being myself. Just before I graduated, I started going to pantos because I had pals who were in them and I really got it. It's quite like live art because there's no fourth wall and you interact. I came to the realisation that theatre is all about entertainment. That's its primary function. If I go to it and I'm bored, it's not worked." His background makes the MacRobert show an invigorating fusion. On the one hand, it has the traditional variety elements that make pantomime such a popular force in Scotland. As well as McKnight's dame, inspired by the sharp-talking women in his own matriarchal family, this show even features that dying breed, a female principal boy in the shape of Michelle Gallagher (cue a round of "I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It"). All the boos, hisses and he's-behind-yous will be firmly in place.

On the other hand, the show has borrowed the cheeky self-referential elements from Glasgow's Tron pantos with their knowing subversion of convention. This is a world where characters train at Panto Academy to become principal girls and where the wicked witch turns out to be a pretty good mother.

In addition to that, McKnight is a strong believer in the power of narrative. "I get really frustrated when I see pantos and they aren't telling a story or the story is superfluous to the tricks," says McKnight, who sets to work on each script as early as January. "You need to make your story clear and you need to have characters. If you're writing a baddie, why are they a baddie? In Sleeping Beauty, why does she cast a spell on a new born baby? I need to find a logic for why she would do that."

What it means is that his experience on stage in Stirling does not feel so different to his high-camp adventures with Random Accomplice in autobiographical comedies such as Little Johnny's Big Gay Musical. "With the Little Johnny shows and with the pantos, you've got to charm the audience and take them on a journey with you," he says. "They're quite similar. You know the audience is there, there's no fourth wall and everybody's in this together. All my stuff puts the audience first."

He promises more Little Johnny japes later in 2010 when his company collaborates with the National Theatre of Scotland, but first there is another gear change.

Four days after the last night of Sleeping Beauty, he goes into rehearsals as director of a new play by Douglas Maxwell. Promises Promises is a dark classroom thriller about a supply teacher, played by Joanna Tope, and a six-year-old Somali girl who is accused of witchcraft. "It's a really different style of play for Douglas and for us as a company," he says.

"It's theatre noir, horrific and brilliant. When I read the script, I thought if I don't do this justice, I will hate myself for ever."

Sleeping Beauty, MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling, today until 31 December

Autobahn, theatre review

Published in The Guardian

Autobahn

Tron, Glasgow
4 out of 5

As we move from car to car in Neil LaBute's series of six two-handers, the road seems to get wider, the possibility of escape more remote and the conversation more disturbing. Performed for the first time in the UK by the newly formed Theatre Jezebel, the Autobahn journey starts off light with a sinister edge, and ends up plain sinister.

The playwright doesn't exactly blame the roads for his catalogue of stalkings, gang bangs and child abuse, but he uses cars – "our bubbles of glass and steel" – to exemplify the social atomisation that lets such things happen. It might not have the misanthropic shock value of the London hits that have earned LaBute his bad-boy reputation, but beneath each of these compelling exchanges lies a dark seam of dysfunctional behaviour.

It would be wrong, however, to give the impression of an evening of gloom and malaise. This is for two reasons. The first is LaBute's spare dialogue, which gives away just enough and no more, meaning you're never certain you've come to the right conclusions, though invariably you have. Autobahn is as much about the keenly observed interplay of the characters – the gaps in communication, the evasions and the status games – as it is about society's ugly underbelly.

The second reason is the production by Mary McCluskey and Kenny Miller, a masterclass in acting. With some parts cross-cast to reveal intriguing gender possibilities, each dazzling performance seems to outshine the last. Sally Reid, with Mickey Mouse ears, shows the psychopath behind the dumb date; Candida Benson is a mess of neurotic tics, as she searches for the words to say sorry; Alison Peebles disguises a night of debauchery behind her shades; and so on, until Johnny Austin delivers a stunning exercise in silence and stillness as his wife, played by Angela Darcy, uncovers his one last terrible secret.

Until Saturday. Box office: 0141-552 4267.

© Mark Fisher 2009

Derevo's Natura Morte theatre preview

Published in Scotland on Sunday

Natura Morte by Derevo/Akhe/Conflux theatre preview

IF YOU go down to The Arches this week, you're in for a big surprise. The show you see in the subterranean Glasgow theatre will be of your own choosing. It might not even be the same as the show your friends see.

That's because at 20-minute intervals during Natura Morte, a promenade performance in the rarely used basement-level arches, you will be asked to decide where to go next. All the time, there are seven or eight scenes running in parallel. Unless you return on successive evenings, you will see only three of them. "Even husband and wife will be divided," says director and performer Anton Adasinskiy. "One room will be a dance show, in another a piece of storytelling, in another a clown piece."

Adasinskiy is the founder of Derevo, the Russian-German physical theatre company that has built a formidable cult following on the Edinburgh Fringe. Natura Morte is a collaboration between Derevo and another Fringe favourite, Akhe, a visually ravishing company from St Petersburg. Where previous visits have allowed us to see established productions from their repertoire – Fringe First- winning shows such as Akhe's White Cabin and Derevo's Once – this is a rare opportunity to be in at the start of one of their productions, and one custom-built for this remarkable space.

"The work will be very experimental," says Derevo's Elena Yarovaya, sitting in the Arches restaurant after an intense day of rehearsal and discussion. "It's the first time we have collaborated with performers who are not from our style of theatre. We have a long relationship with the Scottish public, but this is the first time we are trying to do something together."

She is referring to Conflux, a new project dedicated to the development of street theatre and circus in Scotland, which is the third part of the creative team. Not only is Natura Morte an opportunity for Scottish practitioners to work at an international level – the show goes to Dresden after Glasgow – but it also opens up possibilities for Derevo to work in a new way. "They're all professional, they're all great, but they're very different," says Adasinskiy. "We're improvising every day, then Elena and I will choose the best pieces and the best people and combine the groups and start to put things together. All the material will come from the artists and they'll be happy to play because they will have created it themselves. My task is to press people to make sure they produce only diamonds."

"When we start to work together we create a common atmosphere," says Yarovaya. "We call it a soup, boiling in a pan. It's interesting to see how the Scottish performers can be part of our soup."

To bring together such a varied ensemble – 21 artists in all – Adasinskiy has devised a loose story into which the different elements can sit. It is about the Weatherman, a magical figure who can influence the weather. Nobody can see him, but he is always just around the corner, leaving traces of his presence. "He spends years to make himself an expert in different art forms," says Adasinskiy. "He is a good dancer, musician, mime, singer and clown. He doesn't want to show himself, but he will show his art. So the artists play different parts of his soul. All their different styles speak about one man."

For the director, it's a way of talking about the capacity within us all to pursue different avenues in life. It's a reminder that, whatever age we are, we are never too old to return to the ambitions we had in our youth. "The main message of the show is that there's still time to change," he says. "There's still time to go left or right, to return to your dream when all doors were open."

The choices that we make as an audience, deciding what show we see, remind us of the choices we have in life. It is, he says part of a renewed interest in narrative, that he plans to develop further in Harlequin, a new show that Derevo will bring to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2010. "Sometimes I see a dance show and I can't decide what they're trying to say," says Adasinskiy, whose shaven head and gaunt looks make him ideal casting as Mephistopheles in Alexander Sokurow's Faust, which he recently finished shooting in Iceland. "Who put that movement on the stage? Why did some people jump all together? I want to go back to a time when theatre was very understandable, like a fairytale. I want to make a simple, beautiful, lyrical story for people and this will be my next show. It's important for me to get back on the stage with an open heart."

• Natura Morte is at the Arches, Glasgow, 10-13 November. www.thearches.co.uk

© Mark Fisher 2009

Peter Pan and JM Barrie

Published in Scotland on Sunday

Peter Pan and JM Barrie

PETER Pan might be the boy who wouldn't grow up, but he has no trouble proliferating. As we approach the 150th anniversary of the birth of JM Barrie, our appetite for the Kirriemuir writer's most famous creation appears to be insatiable. The boy from Neverland is everywhere.
In a year when Scottish audiences have enjoyed productions of Peter Pan by Glasgow theatre company Visible Fictions and New York's Mabou Mines, Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum is about to stage it again as a Christmas show. "Every man wants to be Peter Pan," says director Jemima Levick, who wants to explore new dimensions to the story, "but I'm interested in Wendy and Hook." Meanwhile, the second best-selling show in London this summer was a high-tech staging of Peter Pan in Barrie's old stomping ground of Kensington Gardens directed by Ben Harrison, famed for his work with Edinburgh's Grid Iron theatre company. So successful was this multimedia spectacular that it is about to open for a pre-Christmas run at London's vast O2 arena and plans are under way for productions in San Francisco and Australia.

All this is before the National Theatre of Scotland takes on Peter Pan for a UK tour to coincide with the Barrie anniversary on 9 May next year. Staged by four of the team who brought us Black Watch, it is being relocated to Victorian Edinburgh by playwright David Greig. Director John Tiffany calls it "the most influential story ever written by a Scottish writer".

So what is it about this story, first staged in 1904 and put on the cinema screen by Walt Disney in 1953, that continues to capture our imagination? In the year when Michael Jackson, the self-styled Peter Pan of pop, tragically proved himself a boy who really couldn't grow up, what does our obsession with this myth tell us about our own times? And in an era when no-one can get near a child without the approval of the Independent Safeguarding Authority, what are we to make of Barrie himself, a man who openly revelled in the company of little boys?

As far as Barrie biographer Lisa Chaney is concerned, Peter Pan is a play of timeless genius. "It is one of the great – and profoundly underestimated – works of art of the 20th century," says the author, whose Hide-And-Seek With Angels: A Life of JM Barrie was published in 2005. "His contribution is enormous."

Chaney's enthusiasm is echoed by Ben Harrison. "It's up there with Waiting For Godot – and there's more flying," says the director. "It's an endlessly fascinating myth and, just like Peter himself, it is always slightly beyond your grasp."

If Peter Pan has been underrated, it is because of the patronising assumption that the story is for children and therefore lacks seriousness, an assumption bolstered by pantomime versions that pile on the swashbuckling action and cut out the profundity. At it's best, however, the play talks to people of all ages not simply about battles with ticking crocodiles and pirates with hooks, but about creativity, the passage of time and the elusive nature of childhood.

"It's about unfulfilled desires of all sorts," says Liza Lorwin, writer and producer of the heartbreaking Mabou Mines production in this year's Edinburgh International Festival. "When I read it as a teenager, it was the atmosphere of the book that got me, its adolescent yearning and unfulfilled desire. As I looked at it again as the mother of a five-year-old, it was more about that moment when you re-experience your childhood through your child and then they start to fly away."

For Chaney, Peter Pan plays on the tension between having to grow up and the fear that adulthood will steal our imagination. Barrie relished the creative spirit, but knew we deny adulthood at our peril. "Michael Jackson is an example of how, when you don't listen to that message, terrible things happen to you," she says. "Jackson tried to deny time and when you do that, you become a tragic monster. Peter Pan doesn't become physically monstrous, but the tragedy for him is that, when he flies back, the bars are up and he can't get in the room. He is condemned to be youthful for ever."

What it says about today, suggests Chaney, is that ours is a society reluctant to face the responsibilities of adulthood. "Intuitively, Barrie was trying to understand the West becoming an industrial society," she says. "Nineteenth-century man began to dislike adulthood because adulthood meant accepting the age that he lived in. You escape that subconsciously by becoming a child. Today there are many Peter Pans and there are many different ways in our society of people not accepting what it means to be a true adult. It's just too painful. Peter Pan becomes more relevant every day."

But Barrie's insight came at a price. Haunted by the death of his 13-year-old brother, yearning for his mother's affection and forced to grow up quickly when he was sent away to school, he developed a fixation with childhood that, to modern eyes, seems unhealthy. He was not alone in this. As author Philip Pullman sees it, Barrie was one of a generation of turn-of-the-century male writers with a highly romanticised view of childhood.

"Barrie is the extreme case (of arrested development] but that sort of feeling was very strong in a number of British writers of around that period," says Pullman, citing also Kenneth Grahame and AA Milne. "I've got a complete set of Punch from the 1920s when Milne was an assistant editor and the cartoons, which are beautifully illustrated, have a feeble joke and some half-dressed little nymphet standing there looking appealing and saying something winsome to a fondly adoring mother. You think, this isn't a joke – there's something weird going on here."

Exactly how weird, in Barrie's case, we can only speculate. Was his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family – as played out in the 2004 film Finding Neverland with Kate Winslet and Johnny Depp – merely the act of an avuncular thirtysomething? Or was there some more troubling motivation behind his affection for Sylvia's five sons? When his wife, Mary Ansell, said he was impotent, did she mean he was asexual or that his passions were directed elsewhere?

And when we read The Little White Bird, a precursor to Peter Pan, with its descriptions of a man undressing a little boy before bathing him and sleeping with him, is it really only our post-Freudian sensibility that causes us to raise an eyebrow? "I placed him on my knee and removed his blouse," Barrie writes with unsuppressed excitement. "This was a wonderful experience."

Psychologist Lorraine O'Sullivan says it is impossible to know if Barrie loved childhood or children, but his behaviour – like that of Jackson, who named his ranch Neverland, invited boys to play and once declared "I am Peter Pan" – would alarm any child protection expert today.

"The question people ask about Barrie is was he trying to corrupt children with an adult desire or was he trying to rejoin them in the innocence of childhood?" she says. "But you can't join children in the innocence of childhood when the power balance is not equal. He was a wealthier man than the family he was involved with, so he was able to buy them gifts and had financial influence as well."

We would call that grooming, but Chaney argues it is wrong to project our values onto another era. After all, Nico Llewelyn Davies, the youngest brother, saw nothing underhand in the behaviour of "Uncle Jim", saying Barrie "was the least interested in sex... he was an innocent".

"I think he was non-sexual," says Chaney. "I put Michael Jackson in the same category. I think he probably did have kids in bed with him and I do not believe he did anything more than cuddle them, just as I don't believe Barrie did anything more. I don't think either of them was capable of it. Barrie couldn't be normal, but that doesn't mean he was a sexual freak. He loved the children with a smothering love because he didn't understand emotionally how to be a proper adult."

That, says O'Sullivan, could be just how sexual predators would like us to think of them. What better disguise than to write openly about your desires? "People who behave in a predatory way towards children create their own norms. As far as they can push it, they get society to accept their norms. By saying things in a matter-of-fact way, you're saying, 'This is normal and it's innocent.' People get away with an awful lot when the inveigle their way into families. That's what grooming is about: you think, 'Am I over-reacting if I think this is wrong, because everybody else seems to think it's OK?' I could never say one way or the other about Barrie, but when you have a male in a position where he's wanting to play in an innocent way with children, it's either incredibly naive or it's manipulative because the power balance is so different."

What all this should mean for our enjoyment of his work is debatable. Like the music of Michael Jackson – at least before he turned messianic – Barrie's Peter Pan remains a towering achievement whatever his sexuality. It has endured because it affects us on the deepest level. "At its heart is the idea that growing up is the most exciting and most terrifying thing," says Tiffany. "And that makes Peter Pan the ultimate tragic figure."

A literary life

BORN in Kirriemuir, 20 miles north of Dundee, on 9 May, 1860, James Matthew Barrie was the son of a weaver and the second youngest of ten children.

At an early age he was packed off to Glasgow Academy, where two of his siblings taught, and continued his education in Forfar and Dumfries. While studying at Edinburgh University, he began writing theatre reviews and went on to spend 18 months as a journalist on the Nottingham Daily Journal before returning to Kirriemuir and turning his mother's stories into publishable works of fiction.

These kick-started a literary career that began with his debut novel, Auld Licht Idylls, in 1888. He developed a parallel career as a dramatist, enjoying his biggest successes in the early-1900s with Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton and Peter Pan. The theme of the boy who wouldn't grow up continued to haunt him and, in 1911, he published Peter And Wendy, a more sophisticated reworking of the play in novel form. He married actor Mary Ansell in 1891, a childless marriage that ended 18 years later after she had an affair. He died of pneumonia on 19 June, 1937.

© Mark Fisher 2009