New Works, RSAMD/One Academy theatre review

Published in The Scotsman

New Works

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh

THE Traverse used to take a break after the Edinburgh Festival Fringe , but not any longer. Just a few weeks after the curtain fell on the theatre's last festival season show, the Traverse is back in action with exactly the kind of mix that makes it's programme such a magnet in August.

Vox Motus has been attracting big crowds for Bright Black (now on tour); Traverse artistic director Dominic Hill is already in rehearsal for The Dark Things and, in the studio for three days, the RSAMD's One Academy company has been staging works in progress by Linda McLean, Douglas Maxwell and David Harrower.

These three plays are something of a mid-term report both for the student actors making their first steps towards a professional career, and for the writers who, thanks to a collaboration with the Playwrights' Studio, have been able to give their unfinished plays an early airing. The programme recalls the exciting The World Is Too Much series of early-morning readings during the Fringe, which gave audiences a first-draft insight into the creative process.

In Reminded of Beauty, Linda McLean is in the same troubling territory of traumatised children and dysfunctional adults she established in Riddance and Strangers, Babies. Here she juxtaposes scenes of violent child abuse with the story of an estranged couple haunted by the death of a daughter. At this stage, we don't know the connection between the two, but the answer could be in the strange sock puppet whose benign presence brings comfort to her distressed characters.

David Harrower's Ashes Blood, by contrast, is unlike anything he's done before. The author of Knives in Hens and Blackbird switches between narration and straight drama to tell a compelling story of a young man desperate to do right by his father in the family coach-hire business. It'll take another act before we find out what led to the suicide attempt that opens the play, but the very promising first half certainly leaves us wanting more.

Which is also the case with Douglas Maxwell's The Fever Dream: Southside, a funny, hallucinatory thriller with an apocalyptic atmosphere, set in a present-day Glasgow where a serial killer is at large. The only one of the three plays that appears to have been written with the cast in mind, it shows promise for the future – and is also a thoroughly accomplished hour of theatre right now.
© Mark Fisher 2009

The Beggar's Opera, theatre review

Published in The Guardian

The Beggar's Opera

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
2 out of 5

You have a great idea. You imagine John Gay's 18th-century satire could be set in some cyberpunk future, where the highwayman Macheath is now a "super-thief" at large in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. It would be an oversexed society in which the outlaw's girlfriends, with their nostalgic obsession for early 21st-century designer gear, would be motivated by lust, while the older generation would care only for money. At the age of 121, Madonna would be the last surviving celebrity from the time of the global floods, and the world would have descended into dog-eat-dog violence.

You realise that instead of using the musical arrangements of Johann Pepusch or Benjamin Britten, you could bring in Glasgow's A Band Called Quinn for an authentically grungy blast of Goldfrapp-style electro-pop. And you know designer Kai Fischer would dream up a stunning set, a literal underworld beneath a root-strewn ceiling with a large skylight through which you could see Finn Ross's comic-book animations. It would be bold, adventurous and of-the-moment, and would break the rep theatre routine for the Royal Lyceum as it launched its autumn season.

Indeed, Matthew Lenton's hugely ambitious production for Vanishing Point achieves all of these things – but entirely at the expense of the play.

The actors can't be blamed for looking lost, and not only because many are performing from behind gas masks or up to their ankles in sand. It's also because the black-and-white certainties of the production's Bladerunner world leave no room for characterisation, making most of them look like hammy pantomime villains.

They are not helped by an updated script that sets out to be witty but comes across as plain vulgar: Macheath, says one, is "an absolute fucking turn-on". This is a production that, despite ticking all the fashionable boxes, has nothing to say about today.

© Mark Fisher 2009

The House of Bernarda Alba, NTS review

Published in The Guardian

The House of Bernarda Alba

Citizens, Glasgow
3 out of 5

With not an Andalusian plain in sight, this House of Bernarda Alba is not exactly as Federico García Lorca imagined it in 1936: it's less about pre-Franco oppression than post-credit-crunch neurosis. The closest we get to Spain is a Royal Doulton figurine of a flamenco dancer. And even that smashes on the plushly carpeted floor of Bernadette Alba's all-beige Glasgow living room as soon as the play begins.

Beneath the family's penthouse apartment, meanwhile, the El Paso nightclub is gearing up for a same-sex wedding reception. And outside, camera crews are queuing up to find out who shot Bernie's husband, a crime boss and father to the five sisters who are just back from the funeral in their designer mourning gear.

However, Rona Munro's bold translation for the National Theatre of Scotland is not the gimmick it may sound. This is a portrait of an all-female household cocooned from the outside world by a domineering mother (a sharp-tongued Siobhan Redmond) and fear of the paparazzi. With only one man – the son of a local mobster – to share between them, the daughters let claustrophobia and sexual frustration get the better of them. By staying loyal to the family, they repress their instincts until something has to give.

But although the relocation does not jar, it cannot match the brooding intensity of the original. Having swapped Spanish austerity for consumerist comfort, these women are more grumpy than desperate. When things get tough, they can always lie back on the sofa and escape into an episode of Gossip Girl. That might make us smile, but it doesn't elicit our sympathy. And, refreshing though it is to see Lorca played with humour, John Tiffany's production strikes an uncertain note. It looks like a raucous all-girls-together comedy – especially with Munro's waspish language – but it pulls us in the opposite direction, towards tragedy.

The approach works well in the communal scenes, as the strong cast engage in a delicate tussle for power. It is less successful in quieter moments, however, when the actors' energy is muted by Laura Hopkins's enclosing white box of a set. The result is a 21st-century family drama with a conclusion that is bitter and bloody, but lacks any sense of cruel inevitability.

© Mark Fisher 2009

Edinburgh Festival and Fringe critic's notebook

Published in Variety

Edinburgh critic's notebook

Such is the power of the Edinburgh Intl. Festival and Fringe that the population of the Scottish capital doubles during August. The city pulses with cultural tourists, and the relationship between actors and audiences is at its most intense. This summer, that relationship emerged as a theme in itself.

In some cases this was explicit. In "The Event," given simultaneous productions in Edinburgh and in Gotham’s Intl. Fringe Festival, playwright John Clancy picked apart the act of staging a play in forensic, postmodern detail. Thesp David Calvitto (Matt Oberg plays the part in New York) spent an hour telling us about being an actor in the play we were watching, but before the metatheatrical games were through, he turned the tables to accuse us of treating real life as a similar kind of spectator sport.

Nobody questioned the role of the audience more unsettlingly than Belgian company Ontroerend Goed. In "Internal," five audience members lined up in front of five actors and found themselves paired off for a one-on-one speed-dating session. After 15 minutes of animated conversation -- or embarrassing silence, depending how well each couple hit it off -- the 10 people reconvened for some group therapy.

If you clicked, you could find yourself in a passionate embrace with a pretty actor. If the sparks failed to fly, you sat there squirming. Either way, you left in a state of emotional turbulence, quite unable to determine where reality had blended with artifice.

One of the most talked about shows on the Fringe was "Trilogy" by the young dancer and theatermaker Nic Green. In an effort to re-engage with feminist ideas -- most notably those expressed in "Town Bloody Hall," a landmark debate involving Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer in Gotham, 1971 -- Green invited a group of local women to dance naked with her.

By the end of the performance, many women in the audience accepted her invitation to remove their clothes for a rousing (but not arousing) chorus of "Jerusalem," a startling example of women reclaiming their bodies from the tyranny of the male gaze.

It sounds shocking, but Green made it feel natural, as did playwright David Greig when, during a rehearsed reading of "Brewers Fayre," he asked the early-morning audience to play the part of the chorus. The relevant lines were projected onto a screen and the audience performed with surprising gusto. It was a clever way of exploiting the unspoken pact between spectator and performer, and made this funny new play about adultery all the more engaging.

Edinburgh audiences have grown used to site-specific theater and thought nothing of dressing in white kimonos for David Leddy’s intimate "White Tea," about a woman reconnecting with her estranged Japanese mother. Likewise, they freely accepted a drink from the bar for Grid Iron theater’s "Barflies," based on the stories of Charles Bukowski and performed in a real-life watering hole.

This also meant auds were primed for Mark Watson’s "The Hotel," possibly the world’s first example of site-specific comedy, in which the audience played guests in a "Fawlty Towers"-style inn run by a neurotic staff with no concept of customer relations or health and safety regulations.

You expect such experiments on the Fringe, but similar realignments were made in the Intl. Festival as well. In Silviu Purcarete’s majestic "Faust," once Ilie Gheorghe’s scholar and Ofelia Popii’s sexually ambiguous Mephistopheles had made their pact, the back wall disappeared from behind them revealing a carnival-like vision of hell taking place in a massive hangar-like space. Ushered out of their seats, the audience joined an increasingly skeptical Faust among the theatrical fireworks and flames.

More subtly, Brian Friel toyed with our suspension of disbelief in "The Yalta Game" -- one of three of his plays staged consummately by Dublin’s Gate Theater -- in which he drew a parallel between the escapist fantasy of a holiday romance and our willingness to escape into the fictional world of the stage.

The Edinburgh Fringe wrapped Aug. 31, while the Intl. Festival closed Sept. 6.


© Mark Fisher 2009

Dennis Kelly on Orphans and Pulling

Published in Scotland on Sunday

MANY a writer would get to Dennis Kelly's position and say goodbye to the theatre. Once you had written a series as delightfully funny as Pulling and seen it broadcast on BBC3, followed by a Bafta nomination for best sitcom and a British Comedy Award (for co-writer and star Sharon Horgan), you'd want to capitalise with further small-screen projects. But that's not the way Kelly plays it.
"Pulling might open doors, but it depends whether they're doors you want to go through," says the 39-year-old writer when we meet in a London bar. "It doesn't have any effect on me as a playwright. Once I'd written Pulling, I had a lot of people asking me if I'd be interested in writing various comedies and the answer is no, really. I've already written one and I'm quite happy with what we've done. Early on, I decided it wasn't a good idea to repeat myself too much because I would get bored. Pulling probably has opened up doors, but I ain't noticed it."

It's an attitude that means he regards the two series of Pulling – plus the final one-off special – in the same light as any of his work, such as After The End, a claustrophobic thriller seen at Edinburgh's Traverse in 2006, and Our Teacher's A Troll, the riotous children's show performed this year by the National Theatre of Scotland. He sees himself primarily as a playwright, although he is talking to Horgan about doing something else – perhaps a film – together.

"When I started doing Pulling, the question for me was would I be taken seriously in theatre?" he says. "But you've got to do what you believe in at that time. We were lucky because we had a lot of control over it. They basically let us do what we wanted. It was collaborative with the producer and director, much like it is doing a play."

Now he's back in Edinburgh with Orphans, a psychological thriller about a couple whose evening meal is interrupted when the woman's brother shows up covered in blood. Set in a well-to-do house in a rough area, it is a realistic play ("The most traditional I've written") in which the characters have no escape from the intensity of the real-time action. "It's an incredible rollercoaster," says director Roxana Silbert of Paines Plough, who also worked on After The End. "The play is like a hothouse because the characters are under pressure from the beginning. You just see the heat turned up and up."

Kelly admits he would never have the audacity to write a play that presented a thesis, one that carefully argued a case to win people over. Rather, he uses drama to explore unresolved, elliptical questions. "Roxana has this theory that I constantly contradict myself," he deadpans. "Which I don't."

Such an approach would trouble actors trained under the principles of Stanislavski, the Russian director who broke down dramatic characters into a logical series of desires and actions. To Kelly, this method is reductive.

"It denies our ability to hold completely contradictory opinions in the same mind and in the same moment," he says. "We can think that someone is the best person in the world and two weeks later realise we always hated their guts. Narratives say you are one thing or the other, we're going this way or that way, but being a human isn't like that. We love our friends and we're intensely jealous of them. I know I am capable of incredible generosity, but I can be a real arsehole at times."

Fans of Pulling will find themselves in much darker territory with Orphans, though it is not without its gallows humour. "It's happened in plays I've written previously where the comedy happens in the same moment as the dark stuff," says Kelly. "Actually, in Pulling we never really tried to make it funny, we just tried to make it real. We let the funny come out of the situation – as well as the pain the character was going through at the time."

True to form, he contradicts himself almost immediately. "Even though I say we didn't deliberately make Pulling funny, we sort of did. We knew we were trying to write a comedy. I wouldn't come to Orphans expecting Pulling because it's completely different." v

Orphans, Traverse, Edinburgh, 8-30 August


© Mark Fisher 2009

Mercy Madonna of Malawi - report from Malawi

Mercy Madonna of Malawi - theatre preview

Published in Scotland on Sunday


THIS morning the Kumbali Cultural Village is deserted. It's just us and a cluster of mud huts surrounding a thatched amphitheatre, its stage open to the sky.

A couple of months ago, here on the outskirts of Lilongwe, it was all different. With a flurry of excitement, Madonna, that most Western of pop stars, came to be entertained by a Malawian theatre troupe on this very stage. With press and paparazzi kept well away, she made the short journey down the dirt track from Kumbali Lodge, her upmarket base in Malawi, bringing 24 bodyguards – nine local, the rest from her own staff – to make an unlikely audience for the afternoon show.

The play she watched was about a returning expat who won't stop complaining about the state of Malawi compared with his adoptive home in the West. Only after being seduced by the rhythms of a traditional African dance does he realise how much the lifestyle of the azungo (the Malawian word for white man) has stressed him out. "Azungos do everything by the clock," he says. "Now I'm realising that all the white people have got watches, but we Malawians have got the time."

It was a wise observation, but from the audience, Madonna took it as her cue. "No, you don't have the time," heckled the original Material Girl. "You need to work hard. Money is the answer to everything."

For performer Shambi Banda, Madge's remark summed up the moral dilemma this rich white woman presents. She was in the country to adopt four-year-old Mercy James, a sister for David Banda, yet everything she represents seems at odds with Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries. "Personally, it has brought a lot of drama in my head," he says today. "How many kids are orphans in the world; why has she chosen Malawi? There are some areas where we Malawians are a little bit lazy. Whenever someone wants to tamper with the constitution of Malawi, as long as he or she has got cash, we just say yes."

It is this tension between rich and poor that underscores Mercy Madonna Of Malawi, an upbeat musical coming to the Edinburgh Fringe that gives a distinctively African spin on the pop star's adventures in this far-off landlocked country. Directed by Toby Gough – whose previous Fringe successes include Children Of The Sea, which was performed by survivors of the Asian tsunami – it fuses traditional Malawian dance with Western-influenced music to question the rights and wrongs of a contentious story. Against expectation, the show does not paint Madonna as the villain, however, although having her played by a tall black man in a blonde wig gives you some idea of the play's knockabout irreverence. That's because the disquiet expressed by Banda is far from universal among Malawians. On the show's first public performance in a remote village deep in the countryside near Mulanje mountain, I see this for myself. Quizzed by an actor playing a TV reporter outside the Blantyre courtroom, the audience of villagers are united in their opinion that Mercy James should be allowed to go with the pop star. However hard the actor tries, there is not a single dissenting voice.

"In Malawi we have so many kids suffering, so if we have someone who says she is capable of looking after them, we don't have problems giving them away," says Ben Michael Mankhamba, the country's leading political songwriter, who has contributed a number of songs to the show.

"It's better the kids have a better life than be suffering here. You can't look after everybody, so if somebody comes and picks two or three, it's better for them. Some people are lucky, some are unlucky, so let's not bar the chances for others. People who are graduating from universities all want to leave Malawi, so why should we stop a kid? My only view is that now and then they should be bringing them back to the original country, so they don't forget it."

Such opinions highlight the economic disparity between the developed and developing worlds. Many Malawians see it as a great opportunity to be taken under the wing of a wealthy Western pop star – even if her music is known only hazily ("I knew her from the radio, not from the looks," says Ben Michael). Few are troubled that the supreme court judges effectively exempted Madonna from the law that adoptive parents must live in the country for 24 months as well as be married.

Nobody knows too much about Kabbala, the mystical branch of Judaism to which the star subscribes, but a leftfield religion seems a fair price to pay in return for the work of her Raising Malawi children's charity. Above all, they're glad David Banda and Mercy James have a chance to better themselves in the West – and maybe they'll return one day to make use of their wealth and education.

Talking to people here, you start to wonder if objecting to Madonna is a privilege only rich Westerners can afford. Would the story remind me of the dark days of the colonial slave trade, which David Livingstone campaigned against in this very country, if I weren't an oversensitive white man? After all, Madonna clearly wants to love and care for her children – and she wasn't to know that both fathers are still around – so what harm can it do?

Maxwell Matewere has some answers. He is executive director of Eye of the Child, the campaigning watchdog that objected to both of Madonna's adoptions in court. Over tea in a Blantyre hotel, he explains in lawyerly detail how different such cases look the moment you put the interests of the child at the heart of the argument. "We spend our time trying to change people's attitudes towards children," he says of his organisation. "If you ask most families – even members of parliament – what assets they have, they will say, 'I have a chair, a house, a car and I have children.' So children are counted as part of our assets, meaning you can do anything you want to them."

Although ultimately unsuccessful, he regards Eye of the Child's challenges to Madonna in court as important test cases that will help bring an antiquated law up to date. "I do understand the position of most of the Malawians who think this is a fantastic opportunity, but even if we had millions of orphans, should we say that they should lose some of their rights?" he says, observing that some orphanages use adoption as a way of raising money and one has even tried to auction children on the internet. "Or should we forget our responsibility as adults to care and provide protection? If Madonna comes, should we say she can have as many children as she likes? That's not on."

He believes the parent's contribution to Malawi should not be a criterion for adoption. More important is to know what provision will be made to care for and protect the child once abroad. Better still would be to find a way to support the child within Malawi. "We are afraid if we're not careful that, with this understanding, in order for a foreigner to adopt children there has to be some compensation as part of the process," he says.

"The Supreme Court mentioned that Madonna had demonstrated her commitment to Malawi (by investing in schools]. But if you have to subject adoption to that, what is your interest? Is it to find a family for the child or to find the money to contribute to the shortfalls of our system? We should look into the eyes of the children and come up with a solution to help them. We have so many children who need care, but the best solution is to find ways to care for them locally, not exporting them."

These arguments mean that when the cast gather round a cross-dressed Madonna wearing T-shirts sporting the slogan "Adopt me" with an arrow pointing to their faces, it is both funny and poignant. The show makes no comment on Madge's motives, but uses the situation to reflect – in an infectiously musical way – on a world in which the bonds of family, culture and country can be broken by the brute force of economics.

"Malawi is not as terrible as people make out; it's not a place you have to take people away from," says director Toby Gough, who created the African Julius Caesar in the country in 1998. "It's not a land of death and famine; it's a very vibrant, friendly place. One argument is that Madonna can take the child out because she's got the money to do it. The other argument is she is a woman who cares for the children of Africa and is using her money to help out. I don't think there's any right or wrong answer." v

Mercy Madonna Of Malawi, St George's West, Edinburgh, 7–31 August, 3pm www.theworldfestival.com, www.edfringe.com


© Mark Fisher 2009

Cooking with Elvis, theatre review

Published in the Guardian.

Cooking with Elvis

When Newcastle's Live Theatre presented Lee Hall's black comedy a decade ago, it did so with such a surfeit of charm that you almost didn't notice its taboo-busting excess. Here was a play whose pivotal character was a quadriplegic with head trauma and yet, despite scenes of under-age sex, man-on-man hand-jobs and cannibalism – not to mention a great bestiality joke – it remained giddily funny and surprisingly innocent.

Ten years on, Andy Arnold's production is a welcome addition to an otherwise quiet theatrical summer, but not until its exuberant curtain call – all fluttering bank notes, flickering lights and dazzling fireworks – does it get the measure of Hall's audacious comedy. Grounded by Neil Haynes's boringly literal domestic set, the show is slow to build a comic momentum, preferring domestic realism to cartoon overkill, and manages to be only sporadically funny.

What comes across most forcibly is Hall's bold discussion of bodily desire in a way that is both serious and vulgar. Grunting in his wheelchair, Gavin Mitchell as the paralysed father has been reduced to a machine for eating, pissing and ejaculating. There are strong parallels with his alter ego, a perfectly realised Elvis Presley, with a soft southern drawl and flamboyant wardrobe, who suffers erectile dysfunction and a fatal addiction to hamburgers. But whether as father or Elvis, Mitchell is trapped inside his body.

Meanwhile, hungry for affection, his wife (Deirdre Davis) and daughter (Jayd Johnson) develop a neurotic relationship with food and an unhealthy lust for a man from the cake factory.

That subjects of such sensitivity can be made even vaguely funny is a considerable achievement, but behind Hall's heavily ironic happy ending is an anarchic energy that this production is too tame to release.


© Mark Fisher, 2009

Good Things, theatre review

Published in the Guardian.

Good Things

Pitlochry Festival Theatre
4 out of 5

"The good things some folk throw away," says Alan Steele's Frazer, eyeing up a bin bag of castoffs in Liz Lochhead's midlife crisis comedy. Like clothes in a charity shop, he and Carol Ann Crawford's Susan are good things that have been discarded – he bereaved by his mother, she dumped by her husband for a younger woman. Be it Christmas or Valentine's Day, they are the unwrapped presents nobody wants.

In a wish-fulfilment fantasy for the fortysomething generation, Susan is Cinderella, wishing she could get away with wearing a pair of red high heels again, and Frazer is her Buttons, destined to win our hearts and remain on the shelf. Prince Charming is Dougal Lee's David, a neighbour from over the road, while Isabelle Joss gamely plays the dame, darting in and out of the changing room and emerging freshly attired as a different character every time.

Five years after its debut, Lochhead's play is improving with age. There's still a bit too much of it and the pace can seem constrained by the naturalistic setting, but in Ken Alexander's sturdy production, it is proving to be a touching, warm-hearted and very funny expression of the lives of a lost generation.

That it works so well is partly because it finds an audience in Pitlochry that, being older than average, understands the characters' experiences dealing with elderly and dying relatives, and perhaps also wayward partners and defiant children. But it's also because of four splendid performances, chief among them Crawford, who plays Susan with assurance, grace and empathy. Not only does she understand the comedic rhythms of Lochhead's Glasgow speech patterns, but she delivers them with razor-sharp accuracy. It's a virtuoso performance, but played with such modesty that you only admire the character more, and hope against hope that the second-hand shoes will fit.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Good Things, theatre review

Published in Northings.

GOOD THINGS

Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry

MARK FISHER reckons Pitlochry’s new production of Liz Lochhead’s play betters the original.

IT’S RARE enough to see a second staging of a recent Scottish play, but Pitlochry Festival Theatre is earning a reputation not only for championing such work, but for doing it better than the debut productions. After turning out an interpretation of Outlying Islands by David Greig last year that was superior to the Traverse Theatre premiere, the company has revived Liz Lochhead's five-year-old mid-life crisis comedy Good Things and exceeded the fine Borderline original.

This is only in part because the play is such an ideal match for the Pitlochry audience. Being a typically older crowd, they are instinctively attuned to the concerns of Lochhead's central character, Susan Love, a 49-year-old mother who has been dumped by her husband for a younger, more fertile model. Like the books and clothes in the Glasgow charity shop where she works, Susan is a "good thing" that nobody wants, a woman full of life, love and good humour, whose potential is going to waste.

The story Lochhead tells has a girl-meets-boy familiarity, the difference being that instead of a teenage search for romance, this is a quest belonging to an older generation; a little less intense, perhaps, but no less in earnest. Aiming for the atmosphere of feelgood Christmas movies and modelling her plot on Cinderella, the playwright fashions a wish-fulfilment fantasy that is full of the raw detail of senile parents, dying relatives and bolshie teenage daughters. It is very funny even as it acknowledges the bleak truth of our mortality.

There are weaknesses in the play, which sometimes drags under the weight of charity shop routine and Lochhead's love of a big speech, but in Ken Alexander's assured production, it is hilarious, big hearted and touching. Alan Steele and Isabelle Joss do a splendid job playing multiple characters thanks to quick changes in the wings, while Dougal Lee makes a worthy flesh-and-blood Prince Charming, a laidback widower with the gift of a pair of red shoes.

But the absolute highlight in a terrific cast is Carol Ann Crawford as Susan. Sad but not self-pitying, angry but not vicious, funny but not arrogant, she paints a humane, empathetic portrait of a woman trying to make a fresh start with all the hope, vulnerability and good cheer you could wish for in a Cinderella.

Good Things is in repertory at Pitlochry until October.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

What Every Woman Knows, theatre review

Published in Northings

What Every Woman Knows

Pitlochry Festival Theatre

J M BARRIE is best known as the creator of Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn't grow up. Here in the Kirriemuir playwright's 1908 play, What Every Woman Knows, we find another boy who wouldn't grow up, except on the surface the circumstances are very different.

John Shand – played by a suitably unreflexive Christopher Daley – is a self-made man who has worked his way up from railway porter to MP through a combination of natural intelligence, unstoppable self-belief and dogged application. His achievement is great, but it is at the expense of self-knowledge. When it comes to emotional intelligence, he is a child – perhaps even less than a child, for not only is he incapable of expressing love, he has no sense of humour and cannot laugh.

Maggie Wylie – played with great sensitivity by Irene Allan – is emotionally damaged in another way. She has grown up under the misapprehension that she is charmless and unlovable and that she counts for nothing in a man's world. Her inferiority complex nearly cripples her.

The two make an unlikely couple – indeed, it is a relationship forged only from a financial deal with the woman's family – and, inevitably, their marriage implodes. John feels the rush of sexual attraction (for another woman) for the first time, just as Maggie is getting to grips with being the real power behind his throne. It’s a crisis that forces them to realign their relationship and the play ends with some hope of equality in the battle of the sexes.

In this, the play comes across as lightweight Ibsen or less verbose Shaw, a proto-feminist parable infused with Barrie's observations about the class divide, the grip of the establishment and the behind-the-scenes nature of political power. In psychological terms, it is about two lost children reaching a sense of wholeness and maturity through each other, although the play's fear of sexuality probably speaks more of Barrie's own hang-ups.

John Durnin's production has something of the stiffness of John Shand himself, but it shows off a little seen play to good effect and rattles along entertainingly, almost enough to overlook Elizabeth Graham's terrible French accent.

What Every Woman Knows is in repertory at Pitlochry until October.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Whisky Galore, theatre review

Published in Northings.

WHISKY GALORE – A MUSICAL! (Pitlochry Festival Theatre)

GETTING A musical right is one of the hardest jobs in the theatre. Many a brilliant song has been axed on Broadway when it was blamed for hampering the rhythm of the show. And when musicals flop they flop spectacularly.

So it's a double credit to Pitlochry Festival Theatre that not only is the premiere of Whisky Galore thoroughly entertaining, but it is also the first musical ever to be staged there. Whether it would survive the rigours of Broadway is a moot point, because Ken Alexander's feelgood production, with a sparkling cast of 14, makes a perfect fit for the theatre in the hills. It’s a wonder they never did a musical before.

Shona McKee McNeil (book) and Ian Hammond Brown (music and lyrics) have gone back to the Compton Mackenzie novel as their source, although those who love the Ealing film will still recognise the tone of gentle comedy. It means we see the story of the Scottish islanders – whose wartime whisky drought is eased when a boat sheds its cargo of "uisge beatha" – both in terms of World War II rationing and in the context of religious rivalry.

Part of an all-Scottish season of plays, it is a distinctively Scottish story, one informed by the tensions of island versus mainland, Scotland versus England and Catholic versus Protestant. In this context, the haul of whisky comes to represent an antidote to military order and Calvinist repression, symbolising the freedom denied by war and religious dogma. It's no accident that its return to the island coincides with the marriage of two sweethearts, the promise of another union and the return of social harmony.

There's a good deal of musical harmony too in the show, which draws influence from sea shanties and traditional folk melodies as well as Andrews Sisters-era popular song and more familiar musicals’ territory. The versatile cast join in on washboard, bagpipes, trumpets, guitars and penny whistles, giving a flavour to the production that is as indigenous as Ken Harrison's island set with its clever impression of the island's scale.

Hammond Brown's love songs have a tendency towards clichè (there's a lot of "bottom of my heart" and "I have a dream" type stuff), but more typically he does a great job at pushing the story forward clearly and tunefully. In the first half, McKee McNeil rather labours the point about the lack of whisky, and the act could be 20 minutes shorter, but she captures the innocent spirit of the original in an honest and unobtrusive way.

Above all, the cast do a tremendous job at keeping things buoyant – everyone is good, but particularly strong are Gillian Ford and Shirley Darroch as the would-be wives – and it’s a great demonstration of what the big Pitlochry ensemble can achieve when it pulls out all the stops.

Whisky Galore is in repertory at Pitlochry until October.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Singin' I'm No a Billy He's a Tim, theatre review

Published in The Guardian.

Singin' I'm No a Billy He's a Tim

3 out of 5

Ever since Hector McMillan's The Sash in 1974, there has been a popular market in Scotland for broad comedies on a sectarian theme. And one look at the audience crowding into the Citizens tells you Des Dillon's Singin' I'm No a Billy He's a Tim is reaching the parts that other theatre can't reach. Produced by the unfunded NLP company, with an uninspiring, low-budget set, it has enjoyed a second sell-out tour of Scotland, with dates lined up in Northern Ireland later in the year. All this while passing under the theatre establishment radar.

You couldn't call it sophisticated, but the production is good fun. Dillon's key gag is to throw two football fans from either side of Glasgow's sectarian divide - Catholic Celtic, Protestant Rangers - into a police cell on the day of an Old Firm match. Tim and Billy (nobody said this was subtle) have to negotiate a path between their desire to see the game and their inbred hatred of each other. In the process, they realise the foolishness of their bigotry.

The trajectory is predictable; the skill lies in Dillon's careful balance between recognising, even celebrating the tribal affiliations of both sides and pointing out that the kind of songs that glory in being "up to our knees in Fenian blood" would be intolerable in any other cultural setting. His raucous sense of humour and keen understanding of the west-coast sectarian mindset make his sisters-under-the-skin message seem a matter of urgency and not just a liberal platitude.

In this, he is aided by the tremendous performances of Scott Kyle (Billy) and Colin Little (Tim), who have a perfect feel for the machismo of the terraces, the stakes involved in the peace process and the no-nonsense comedy of Dillon's script.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland: shortlists announced

Published in The Guardian.

Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland: shortlists announced

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Ghosts, Citizens' Theatre review

Published in The Guardian.

Ghosts review

Citizens, Glasgow
4 out of 5

"All of us are haunted by dead ideas and dead opinions," says the matriarchal Mrs Alving in Ibsen's drama about new ways of living and old skeletons in the closet. Ironically, 130 years down the line, it is the dead ideas of Ibsen that haunt today's stage. No modern playwright would be able to get away with an opening act in which Pastor Manders tells Alving not to take out insurance on her new orphanage, followed by a closing act in which the orphanage burns down. The mechanics are just too obvious.

And whereas in Ibsen's day, Manders was the voice of conventional but very real authority, today he is one step away from ridicule, his homilies about marital fidelity sparking derisory laughter. It's a great credit to Kevin McMonagle that he plays the part with such conviction, riding the laughs but never playing for them, revealing a character who, like all of us, is a product of his age; well-meaning but blind to the bigger picture.

Despite it all, what strikes us is Ibsen's modernity. This is especially clear in Jeremy Raison's streamlined production of the recent translation by Amelia Bullmore, performed without an interval on Jason Southgate's airy, bleached-wood set. Alving's belief that "propriety and law make all the misery in the world" still has a radical charge, while the free-thinking life of her artist son (an excellent Steven Robertson) retains its unconventional allure.

In the lead role, Maureen Beattie seems too big for the world she is born into, too big almost for the stage. Despite the pressures - faithless husband, illegitimate stepdaughter, syphilitic son - she remains unbroken, too proud to let us wallow in her tragedy, too intelligent to accept defeat, making her a very modern woman.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

The Ducky, Borderline Theatre review

Published in The Guardian.

The Ducky review

Eastwood Park, Glasgow
4 out of 5

This play - DC Jackson's sequel to last year's The Wall - starts off light and breezy, charting the lives of a group of Ayrshire teenagers with a throwaway charm. It is neither adventurous nor deep, yet, in the middle of the second half, the play catches you unawares. Suddenly, you realise you care for these young people and their amplified sense of their own significance. Behind the rites-of-passage laughs, Jackson reveals a beating heart.

The Ducky rejoins the characters from The Wall two years down the line, as a traumatised Norma - exquisitely played by Sally Reid - recounts the reasons for losing her virginity. From "his hair was looking nice" to "the sun set pretty", it is a funny, poignant litany showing that Jackson has the popular touch of Willy Russell, packing tender home-truths behind a shield of first-rate one-liners.

Under the assured direction of Jemima Levick, the young Borderline company reminds us why it triumphed as best ensemble at last year's Critics' Awards for Theatre in Scotland, capturing the intensity, frivolity, vanity and insecurity of adolescence with fine-tuned detail. Like Reid, Hannah Donaldson, Finn den Hertog, Alan Tripney and Jonathan Holt play with a conviction that makes these teenage dramas seem as important as the characters believe them to be.

The result is a feelgood hit, in which the geeky boy gets the gorgeous girl and the brainy outsiders almost figure things out. It's also about birth, death and coming-of-age heartaches. That, and falling fully clothed into the "septic swimming hole" they call the ducky. Roll on part three.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Hoors, Traverse Theatre review II

Published in Variety.

Hoors review

A Traverse Theater, Edinburgh and Ustinov Theater, Bath presentation in association with Tron Theater, Glasgow, of a play in one act by Gregory Burke. Directed by Jimmy Fay.

Nikki - Catherine Murray
Vicky - Lisa Gardner
Stevie - Michael Moreland
Tony - Andy Clark

With characteristic dry humor, playwright Gregory Burke has been billing "Hoors" as the "disappointing follow-up to 'Black Watch.' " Funny though this disclaimer is, there's good reasoning behind it. Few new works could hope to match the acclaim of the National Theater of Scotland production, which just added foreign play honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle to its hefty haul of international awards. That "Hoors" falls short of that achievement is no surprise. What's unfortunate is that this black comedy is also a disappointing follow-up to Burke's earlier work.

It begins with a promising Orton-esque idea. Stage right on Conor Murphy's rather too luxurious set is a coffin containing the corpse of Andy, a young man whose death was brought on by taking too many drugs during a stag weekend in Amsterdam before joining the mile-high club with a stewardess on the flight home. The day earmarked for his wedding has been rescheduled for his funeral.

Burke turns tragedy into comedy by introducing a set of characters with no inclination to grieve. Andy's fiancee, Vicky (Lisa Gardner), has already realized she didn't love him, and is relieved to have her future given back to her. Vicky's sister Nikki (Catherine Murray) is a material girl who talks about her job in military research and development (an underdeveloped tangent), reminding us she has little love of humanity.

Stevie (Michael Moreland) has a severe case of male emotional inarticulacy, and has more coherent memories of the hedonistic excess of the stag weekend than he does of his friendship with Andy. Having established a new life in Dubai, Tony (Andy Clark) is a shallow opportunist who already has consigned Andy to the past.

Their indifference means the forthcoming funeral is less a moment of poignancy than a turning point, an opportunity to break from the past, interrupt old routines and make a new future.

Structurally, this leaves Burke with two problems. The first is that the most vivid action has either happened before the play begins or promises to take place in the future, leaving the characters at a point of stasis. Their conversation -- however witty and ribald -- takes the place of real dramatic action. The second problem is there's little serious conflict, only some minor scores to be settled. Nobody is on hand to be affronted by their disrespect for the dead, so there's little shock value in their irreverence.

On top of this, helmer Jimmy Fay fails to draw out the full raucous power of Burke's writing. Although there are some very funny volleys, the script is hampered by an uneven pace, partly because of the way Murphy's revolving set starts moving before scenes are over, and partly because Murray and Gardner, despite spirited performances, rarely capture the full-on attack of the playwright's language. Moreland and Clark are more successful in this respect -- perhaps a reflection of Burke's feel for the rhythms of male speech. But the play never takes off in the manner of his earlier "Gagarin Way" in terms of either comedy or the articulation of its potentially interesting themes.

Set and costumes, Conor Murphy; lighting, Paul Keogan. Opened May 1, 2009. Reviewed May 5. Running time: 1 HOUR, 40 MIN.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Hoors, Traverse Theatre review

Published in The Guardian.

Hoors review

Traverse, Edinburgh
2 out of 5

A lot has happened before the start of Gregory Burke's new comedy, and a lot is likely to happen after it ends. But it's hard to maintain your interest in a play in which so little actually happens during the 90 minutes on stage. Every character in Hoors has reached a moment of crisis, but by setting the play so firmly at the still point of the turning world, Burke lands the audience in dramatic limbo.

His conceit has big comic potential. Vicky has been forced to turn her wedding day into a funeral after Andy, her fiance, has died during a hedonistic stag weekend in Hamburg and Amsterdam. It would be a bleak scenario were the young woman not happier without him. His death has opened a new world of opportunity for her.

Returning home for the occasion, her financially successful sister Nikki carries a similar sense of leaving the past behind. When Andy's friends call - partly out of respect for the dead, but mainly for the chance to chat up the women - they, too, come to realise his passing marks the end of an era. For father-of-two Tony, it's a last glimpse of a life he once had; for stuck-in-the-mud Stevie, it's the shock of seeing the world moving on without him.

But by focusing on this moment of transition - a vivid life left behind, an unknown vista ahead - Burke introduces an uncharacteristic feeling of inertia. Perhaps that's why Conor Murphy's set revolves more and more as the play goes on. Taking us from living room to bedroom, this bourgeois domestic interior brings its own circling choreography to Jimmy Fay's production, as if to compensate for the lack of dramatic action.

Unfortunately, its overly grand scale and tendency to start turning before a scene is over also saps much of the energy from Burke's writing. At its best, the playwright's language has the scabrous bite and hilarious attack that helped make Black Watch such a hit. Even as he searches for narrative tension, Burke can still deliver volleys of darkly funny barbs and one-liners.

Michael Moreland (Stevie) and Andy Clark (Tony) are perfectly attuned to Burke's rhythms, driven as they are by a forthright swagger and a need to say the unsayable. Despite spirited performances, Catherine Murray (Nikki) and Lisa Gardner (Vicky) seem to trust the language less, which adds to the production's uneven tone.

A less lavish staging would give greater vent to the upfront force of the script, releasing more of its Ortonesque darkness, but Burke has not set the stakes high enough to do justice to his themes.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Bliss/Mud, Tron Theatre review

Published in The Guardian.

Bliss/Mud review

Tron, Glasgow
4 out of 5

It is billed as "Tron Stripped" but, whatever the budget limitations, there is nothing low-rent about the intensity of this north American double bill. Seen individually, Bliss and Mud would pack a powerful punch; together, these bleak studies of the dispossessed are almost overwhelming.

Bliss by Olivier Choinière - in a crisp translation by Caryl Churchill - is the missing link between Hello! magazine and David Lynch's Eraserhead. It starts as an ironic portrayal of the life of Céline Dion as seen through the gushingly reductive prose of a celebrity magazine, then mutates into a desperate tale of child abuse and mental instability.

To Oracle, played by Gabriel Quigley, Dion is a latter-day goddess whose most minor actions she imbues with quasi-religious meaning. Initially appearing to be a figure of authority, Oracle turns out to be authoritative only when it comes to pop-star trivia. In every other aspect of her life she is a powerless victim; Quigley brilliantly captures the vulnerability, delusion and conviction of a deeply damaged woman.

Andy Arnold's production shows some signs of first-night nerves, but it is unsettling in its transformation from the throwaway to the horrific.

If there's something condescending about Maria Irene Fornes's portrayal of illiterate hicks in Mud, it is offset by the sensitivity of the actors' performances.

This time, Quigley is pinning her hopes of salvation on Grant Smeaton's mild-mannered Henry, whose marginally superior education offers the possibility of escape from poverty. Her attempted departure, bleakly echoing that of Nora in A Doll's House, leads not to emancipation but tragedy, brought on by Mark Prendergast's dysfunctional housemate. Dark humour and moments of hope compensate for the desolation.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Tom McGrath obituary

Published in The Guardian.

Tom McGrath obituary

It must have been about 1990 when I first interviewed the poet and playwright Tom McGrath, who has died from cancer of the liver aged 68. It was in his Edinburgh office at the Royal Lyceum, where he was the Scottish Arts Council's associate literary director. Some time around the point when I turned the cassette tape over, I asked my second question. McGrath did not do soundbites.

Such loquaciousness would be indulgent in some, but with McGrath - genial, generous and quick to laugh - it was just the way his mind worked. Each thought would trigger a new idea, each allusion a digression, each digression firing another set of mental synapses. Conversation with him was like navigating through a sea of possibilities; it took time to reach the destination, but the journey - always logically plotted - was fascinating. In a 1973 poetry anthology, his biographical note describes him simply as "explorer". It was a job title he never relinquished.

This was no less the case in 2005 when I met him near his home in Kingskettle, Fife, to talk about a revival of his debut play, Laurel and Hardy, and what would be his final stage work, My Old Man. This was two years after he had suffered a stroke; his recovery aided by physiotherapy, prolific writing and a subscription to the New Statesman ("the writers are very predictable but it did give me a point of attack"). Sneaking in a lunchtime drink against doctor's orders, he engaged in a conversation that ricocheted from Billy Connolly to Arnold Schoenberg, William Golding to Oscar Peterson, Liz Lochhead to serial music.

Born in Rutherglen, a suburb of Glasgow, McGrath was the son of an electrician and a housewife. Brought up as a Roman Catholic, he instinctively looked away from the repressiveness of Scottish Presbyterianism and towards the freedom offered by American culture, in particular Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, Jack Kerouac and Charlie Parker. His first poems were published in 1962 and, by 1965, he was reading at the first international Poetry Olympics at the Royal Albert Hall alongside Allen Ginsberg.

While supporting a family in Bermondsey, south-east London - bringing up four daughters with his wife Maureen - McGrath was drawn to the burgeoning underground scene. A CND supporter, he had been features editor on Peace News when, in 1966, he was asked by John Hopkins, Jim Haynes and Barry Miles to be founder editor of the counter-cultural International Times (IT), brought together with what he called "the fervour of a revolutionary movement and the mystique of Zen". He stayed for 12 issues before "the story turned sour", and he left "on the edge of a breakdown".

True to the times, he experimented with psychedelic drugs and was a heroin user for two years. He would revisit his experiences in The Innocent, staged by Howard Davies for the RSC in 1979. At 28, disillusioned with London and "sick with heroin", he returned to Scotland, came off the drug and took a place at Glasgow University to study English and drama.

A gifted pianist, he was musical director on Billy Connolly and Tom Buchan's The Great Northern Welly Boot Show (1972), a riotous celebration of the Upper Clyde shipbuilders' work-in. Two years later, having already brought Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and the Mahavishnu Orchestra to Glasgow, he set up the Third Eye Centre, a shrine to the avant garde, which is still in operation as the Centre for Contemporary Arts. By the time he left in 1977, he was establishing his name as a playwright with close ties to Edinburgh's Traverse, but also found time to establish Glasgow's Tron Theatre at the turn of the decade.

In 1976 Laurel and Hardy, a touching portrait of the double-act, was a popular hit, yet, like The Hardman, which he wrote with the convict Jimmy Boyle, it bore the hallmarks of his interest in jazz, improvisation and poetry. In 1979's Animal - his favourite - he produced a script consisting almost entirely of stage directions and the grunts of a shrewdness of apes.

His other plays include The Android Circuit, 1-2-3 and Buchanan as well as a two-part adaptation of Tankred Dorst's Merlin - translated by Ella Wildridge, his partner of 20 years. As important as these was his work supporting a generation of playwrights - among them David Harrower, David Greig and Douglas Maxwell - and it is thanks to McGrath that the Playwrights' Studio, Scotland was established in 2004.

Never one to trade on past glories, he was restlessly inquisitive to the end. No epitaph better sums him up than his own lines from Laurel and Hardy: "Growing old/My jaws unfold/My face is wrinkled/Starting to crinkle/But we'll be bold/Before we're old/We'll show them what we're made of."

He is survived by Ella and three of his daughters.

© Mark Fisher, 2009

Philip Pullman interview

Published in Scotland on Sunday.

Philip Pullman interview

DO YOU have difficulty telling your hobbits from your daemons? Can you spot the difference between an Orc and a Gyptian? How easily could you distinguish a Ringwraith from a Cliff-ghast?
If you're at all unsure, you better not mention it to Philip Pullman. The author of Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass (collectively known as His Dark Materials) is in no doubt that his trilogy is in a different class to the work of his fellow fantasist JRR Tolkien. They may be operating in the one genre, but the two are not the same.

"I don't like The Lord Of The Rings," says Pullman. "It is profoundly conservative. It is Little England nostalgic in a way that I have never enjoyed."

This is worth keeping in mind when Birmingham Rep visits the Edinburgh Festival Theatre with its mammoth adaptation of the first two His Dark Materials novels.

Yes, the story of Lyra Belacqua and her travels into parallel universes is a work of rare imagination – alive with fantastic inventions such as the truth-telling alethiometer, the mysterious particles known as Dust and the animal-like daemons who are invisibly conjoined to every person – but so too is it rooted in the real world.

We're sitting by the open stone fireplace in Pullman's low-ceilinged cottage in a village near Oxford. On the windowsill is a maquette of a leaping polar bear, a gift from the design studio of The Golden Compass movie, adapted in 2007 from Northern Lights. It is nearly 15 years since that book picked up a Carnegie Medal, but the 62-year-old still talks animatedly about the trilogy, as if he were as astonished as the rest of us by the universes he created.

"When I was thinking of writing this big fantasy, I thought, 'How can I justify it to myself, morally?'" he says. "'If I don't find a way of connecting it to our lives, if I don't find a way of saying something about what it means to be a human being, then I shall waste seven years on something frivolous.'"

He found the answer in John Milton's Paradise Lost, the epic poem about the temptation of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man. Although Pullman, a prominent atheist, would go on to create a three-volume allegory about the falsity of religion, he saw in this 17th century Christian classic a blueprint for what he could achieve in His Dark Materials.

"I realised that what Milton was doing in Paradise Lost was writing a fantasy – it has people with wings and dungeons full of fire – but he connects most deeply with real life," he says. "Milton was doing something profound and important with fantasy, so I thought it must be possible. That's why in His Dark Materials there is a political subtext and a religious subtext – not very 'sub' either – because I realised I could use fantasy to say something about what it means to be a human being."

The success of The Lord Of The Rings movies and the Harry Potter franchise – and, to a lesser extent, The Golden Compass with Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig – suggests there is a large public appetite for pure escapism. Pullman makes no overt criticism of the JK Rowling books ("When people read Harry Potter presumably they like to escape into the fantasy of an English boarding school with magic things happening," he says. "I don't want to disparage Harry Potter"), but he has little time for Tolkien. "When they read Tolkien, they want to take refuge in Little Englandism, the sense that the hobbits – which are us – are menaced by the nasty people who are somewhere else, but we're jolly brave and we'll fight through. It's a Churchillian vision of fighting on the beaches."

But doesn't His Dark Materials play to the same desire for escapism? "Well, it would be escapist if you just go there to have a lovely time," he says. "If you go there and find it's bloody horrible, you've got a terrible deed to do and it's dangerous and frightening, then maybe the real escapism is in the realistic novel that talks about being a publisher in London and having an adulterous affair."

Exactly why he should find himself so drawn to telling stories about adolescents is a subject he is uncharacteristically reticent to explore. "Those are the stories that come to me," is all he is prepared to say. As for his own adolescence, it was marked by the usual "difficulty, frustration, unhappiness and bewilderment", but above all, it seems to have been characterised by a tremendous creative flowering.

"I became very interested in painting and the visual arts," says Pullman, who was born in Norwich in 1946 and lived in Zimbabwe and Australia before spending his teenage years near Harlech on the North Wales coast. "I had a book about the history of art which I pored over and I did a lot of drawing. I always remember that sense of discovering a world that was opening up. There was a part of me that responded to the arts like a gong being struck. There was a whole world of artistic excitement. Philosophy! People asking questions about if there is a God. What's life about? It was extraordinarily exciting."

Although he gravitates so instinctively to writing about this period in our lives, he does not project the feeling of arrested development that you find in writers such as JM Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and AA Milne. That is deliberate. When he came to write His Dark Materials, he was determined to resist the romantic tradition of childhood laid down by these men.

"The pity of it is they were very gifted writers, so they set a mark for childhood nostalgia and whimsy – and there's something rather sickly and unhealthy about it," he says. "For a certain class of British male writers from the late-Victorian period to the 1920s, there was an unhealthy longing to go back to the nursery. I loathe it. And one of my conscious intentions in writing His Dark Materials was to do a story about children that would not be in the least sentimental, that would show what children really want, which is not to go backwards, but to go forwards – children want to be grown up."

Now Birmingham Rep is bringing the first two books to the stage – using the adaptation first seen at the National Theatre in 2003 – Pullman is genuinely interested to see how it shapes up. He is not precious about how other artists deal with his work as long as they treat the stories with respect. "I've always thought it was utterly stupid to sell the rights to an adaptation and then moan about the way they do it," he says. "If you wrote a strong enough story it will stand up to adaptation. The only thing I'm zealously protective about is the integrity of the story. There was a moment early in the film discussions when somebody high up at the studio said, 'Let's make Lyra into a boy.' That sort of thing you zealously protect."

His Dark Materials, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, May 21-24 www.festivaltheatre.org.uk

© Mark Fisher, 2009