Author Archives: Alan Brown

‘The Last Straw’ (Bedlam: 21 – 25 October ’14)

Posted in 3*, Bedlam, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre by
The Last Straw 1

Photos: Ummatiddle

“…  impro cuts loose, and cries of ‘F –ing awesome’ applaud play and cast.”

Editorial Rating: 3 Stars: Outstanding

A tale of two exclamations from ole stage coach territory. There’s “Whoa!” (Slow down) or “Wow!” (Stop right there. That’s too much). Either way, forget it. The foot brake’s worn, the wheel brake’s a joke, and you’re gonna get hurt, lady, if you stay up top. Best ride is in here, in Bedlam, with us. It’s a long journey of near on two and a half hours but it’s fun.

Director and writer Eric Geistfeld is from somewhere in Minnesota. Home is unlikely to be Bemidji but what the heck, The Last Straw is tv’s Fargo in a gothic farce. It’s intrepid. No quavering, gathered strings here; no hole in the ice but a useful trapdoor. There is breakneck writing, lunatic action, a menagerie of oddball characters, a yellow sex doll, and a lot of laughs.

Upright, young Edward, true-buttoned Brit and in financial services, is just married to Judy, all-American sweetheart, ‘pajamaed’ and with her teddy. They are to live with Violet, Judy’s mother, in Terror Towers. It might as well be Marine Corps ville. Ronald Reagan is venerated and there is a dead butler, resident throughout the first half, who wears aviators and is fed cake, but it’s gum-chewing, pistol packing Violet (Isobel Moulder) who calls the shots, literally. There will be no kids until she’s ashes and she’d be much obliged if her son in law would smoke them after she’s gone. Not that she plans to let him live long. Edward (Macleod Stephen) is a good sort, articulates so well, but realises that his body bag is being prepared. Ma has to go so he puts out a contract on her life, as she has on his.

The Last Straw 2

There is live keyboard but you hang onto the soundtrack. The Magnificent Seven sets us off and then it’s a trip through The First Cut is the Deepest, Our House, The House of the Rising Sun and, of course, Sweet Dreams are Made of This. By this point Edward has taken a slice of sponged cocaine cake and is away, tally-ho, with his toilet plunger and the weird fairies from the basement. The fourth wall crumbled a while back, impro cuts loose,  and cries of ‘F –ing awesome’ applaud play and cast.

The Last Straw goes out to glad-hand its audience. Is it like the Lothian state fair on the Meadows? Kind of. Scenes are gaudy, wisecracking sideshows, neatly divided by a door on wheels. They put their trust in ‘Together we’ll go far’, which just happens to be the slogan of the Wells Fargo bank. Especially successful are ‘The Murderelli Brothers’, possibly from Brooklyn, whose take on Alan Rickman is actually to die for; ‘The Existential Hecklers’ from outta Sartre and ‘The Sad Killer’. What of the main act in amongst these diversions? Beyond the closing cheer of ‘Happy Families’, there needn’t be one. For the best of reasons The Last Straw is a fearless, crowded, tiring, play.

And so to our adventurous rating and ranking of 3* OUTSTANDING. Three stars (safe) because you won’t be disappointed by such a full-on, have-a go, production. Colour coded red – Outstanding – because The Last Straw is remarkable rather than unbearable. I thought so, anyway.

outstanding

StarStarStar

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 22 October)

Visit Bedlam Homepage here

Visit our Assembly Roxy Bedlam Church Hill Theatre Festival Theatre King’s Theatre Other Pleasance, Potterrow & Teviot Summerhall The Lyceum The Stand Traverse archive.

THIS REVIEW HAS NOT BEEN SUBEDITED

‘Outlying Islands’ (Traverse: 1 – 4 October ’14)

Posted in 4*, Rated: Outstanding, Theatre, Traverse by
Martin Richardson. Photo: Graham Riddell

Martin Richardson.
Photo: Graham Riddell

“Wide, invigorating views in a small space”

Editorial Rating: 4 Stars: Outstanding

“‘Scuse my French,” says birdwatcher John – repeatedly. This thoroughly decent young man, BA. Cantab., has had enough – again! The year is 1939 and John is on the remotest of the Western Isles with stinking socks and his gimlet-eyed pal, Robert, who is bound to get the sweet girl first. You might hear the romantic airs of Local Hero within Outlying Islands, for the Celtic soundscape is lovely, but instead I see a fab, screwed up Tintin-esque adventure amongst the fork tailed petrels.

I reckon playwright David Greig likes Hergé’s impeccable line, after all, he did adapt Tintin in Tibet  for a Christmas show at the Barbican in 2005. Outlying Islands has the same startling and redemptive quality of that blameless story. However, the play’s audience also sees scary biological warfare and delightful sex.

It is the sharp clarity of the piece that impresses most. The first lines open with “I have noticed,” and it as if the audience are the ones with the binoculars, watching intently and enjoying what they discover. A bright and acute script paired with alert, insightful direction by Richard Baron is as effective as fixer in old style photographic processing, which you’ll be reminded of. We get focus and definition all throughout, with flashbulbs and nae pixels.

James Rottger and Helen Mackay. Photo: Graham Riddell

James Rottger and Helen Mackay.
Photo: Graham Riddell

We are way out west, literally in a rock burrow, and cinematically in Laurel and Hardy territory. Their 1937 film is Ellen’s favourite but for her ‘Free’ church uncle, Kirk (!), the cinema is a place of darkness where only the Fallen gather. London, by way of the same Calvinist conviction, is a ‘gannetry of random defecation’. What’s a young woman to do – apart from prepare puffin stew? Ellen’s happiness at finding an answer in unforeseen liberty is wonderful, and Helen MacKay is jubilant in the role. Nice John or Johnny, played straight and true by James Rotger, is not a happy chappie when confronted by deep feelings – arguably like Tintin – therefore his discomfort, naked on the kitchen table, is understandable. Martin Richardson is utterly convincing as Robert. Probably amoral, certainly sensitive, fiercely rational, and undoubtedly bad for Kirk’s health, he has the dash of the pagan about him. Crawford Logan has the unsympathetic (adult) roles, playing Kirk, who is mean in spirit, calculating, a relic to be parodied, and, very briefly, the Captain of the ship that returns to take them off the island and back to …. Ullapool?

During the referendum campaign David Greig spoke of Scotland and a Scottish population that had been wearing UK goggles for long enough: ‘goggles which say you never ask questions’. ‘Outlying Islands’ has come back, post Yes/No, and offers wide, invigorating views in a small space. You might pick holes at some cartoonish excess or at the fly-away innocence of the plot or even at some speech bubble dialogue, but I saw an excellent production from  Firebrand Theatre; the same company that brought ‘Blackbird’ (not Leach’s petrel) to Summerhall in February. That was outstanding too.

outstanding

StarStarStarStar

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 1 October)

Visit Outlying Islands homepage here.

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN SUBEDITED

‘Regeneration’ (King’s: 30 September – 4 October ’14)

Posted in 3*, King's Theatre, Theatre by
Jack Monaghan (Prior) & Garmon Rhys (Owen). Photo: Manuel Harlan

Jack Monaghan (Prior) & Garmon Rhys (Owen).
Photo: Manuel Harlan

“‘Anthem for Dead Youth’”

Editorial Rating:  3 Stars

 By 1917, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’s designation in army speak is ‘Not Yet Diagnosed (Nervous),’ which then becomes ‘Shell Shock (wound)’ or ‘Shell Shock (sick)’. You could suffer both. Either way, it was identified as a ‘disability … caused by military service’. Watch this eager, opportune, play and you can add ‘unspeakable,’ ‘crippling’ or ‘shocking’ to the official terms.

Furthermore, pull open one of the gun metal drawers in the War Poets Collection at Craiglockhart and you’ll see an open medical register with ‘Neurasthenia’ entered alongside every one of the thirty plus names down the page. The ledger is matter-of-fact, inoffensive, prosaic for its time. However, writer Pat Barker turned that upside down in the terrific pages of ‘Regeneration,’ and Gillies MacKinnon took that book and made an excellent film of it. Now, Nicholas Wright’s adaptation tries it out on stage, with Simon Godwin directing and aiming high.

It is a fascinating, half-true story. Mutinous ‘Mad Jack’ Siegfried Sassoon (31) did meet Wilfred Owen (24) in Craiglockhart hospital during the summer of 1917. Sassoon did encourage Owen to write about the war. His pencilled revisions are all over a draft of ‘Anthem for Dead Youth’, along the lines of “No, make that… Doomed Youth’. Good man!” Sassoon’s doctor was William Rivers, anthropologist and pioneering psychiatrist. Owen recovers his health, Sassoon accepts counseling. Both officers choose to be ‘discharged to duty’. Both will return to the front line.

Stephen Boxer (Rivers). Photo: Manuel Harlan

Stephen Boxer (Rivers).
Photo: Manuel Harlan

Rivers also has another patient, Billy Prior, a boy from Bradford who knows all too well that he’s only made it to 2nd Lieutenant because the army is fast running out of the privately educated, well spoken type. The exchanges between Rivers – in a fine undemonstrative performance by Stephen Boxer – and the chippy but likeable Prior (Jack Monaghan) are the most forward and challenging in the play. Questions of class, upbringing and sex are insistently between them.

However, the relationship is less spiky between Owen and Sassoon. Garmon Rhys plays the younger man, gauche and pliable, who gains confidence and dignity by the close. Tim Delap is a debonair Sassoon, who has his own terrors in the night but whose brocade dressing gown stands them down. Between the two of them, the love that dare not speak it’s name gets treacherously close.

This production  is ambitious, brisk, and inventive, but its pace reinforces an episodic, fleeting quality. Reflective moments – Rivers dictating case notes, Mr Prior under hypnosis – are precious, but soon give way to the next happening. A burst of machine gun fire or a flash of howitzer blast are like fugitive subtitles, and the compressed script begins to sound sententious, light remarks diverting attention from tough themes. The stark set is washed out, bleached almost, and in need of some gloomy Edwardian mahogany. Additionally, the small marble of Laocoön on Rivers’ desk is a weighty feature that does its job, but otherwise, the fact that the Conservative Club on Princes Street, where Sassoon entertained, is now a Debenhams is indicative of a play piling literary stock and selling low. ‘The Parable of the Old Man and the Young’ it cannot be, although Capt. Rivers remains a merciful saint.

 

Star (blue)Star (blue)Star (blue)

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Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 30 September)

Visit Regeneration‘s homepage here.

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN SUBEDITED

‘Kill Johnny Glendenning’ (Lyceum: 17 September – 11 October ’14)

Posted in 4*, The Lyceum, Theatre by

“A Lock and Load comedy with the safety Off”

Editorial Rating:  4 Stars

How mental do you like your Glasgow? I say ‘your’ advisedly, as this play has barreled its way down the M8 in that distinct, uncompromising “Up yours!” way that makes Edinburgh appear po-faced. D C Jackson has written a lock and load comedy with the safety off. ‘Kill Johnny Glendenning’ is fast, almost ludicrous, and not a little gross.

Droll Weegie humour is too dark for Strathclyde noir. This explosive plot begins with a bang as Bruce Wilson, the crime writer of Glasgow’s ‘Daily Reporter’, is to be taken out of harm’s way before his scurrilous biography of loyalist para-military Johnny Glendenning catches up with him. However, Johnny’s solid and inescapable desire for revenge makes Bruce Wilson’s survival somewhat unlikely. In fact, Johnny G. has set his sights on more than one unlucky victim, as he also goes after Andrew MacPherson, a ‘businessman’, who has cocaine deals to finance. Unfortunately, MacPherson’s laddies, sheepish Dominic (Philip Cairns) and numpty dumpty Skootch (Josh Whitelaw), mess up from accidental start to blood soaked finish. Dominic’s wife, Kimberly (Joanne Thomson), is the surprising Lady Macbeth of the piece, albiet very pregnant one, and one well in tune with Leona Lewis’s ‘Bleeding Love’.

Paul Samson (l) and David Ireland (r)

Paul Samson (l) and David Ireland (r)

The action is as lurid as Skootch’s cream suit, modelled – of course – after Pacino’s in ‘Scarface’. Johnny is a dab hand at pulling teeth and at castration by combat knife. There is lots of gunfire and a maniacal stabbing. The first act, down on Auld John’s farm, ends with bodies being soaked in petrol. Normally in Ayrshire these poor souls would be fed to the pigs, but it is onto douce Hyndland, in Glasgow’s West End, for the second act and a marginally tidier, intelligent backstory.

David Ireland’s Johnny might be a headcase but he remains a neat act. His easy movement, trim beard, and smart banter make the killer look and sound almost companionable, but the mild Ulster accent is as unnerving as the tattoos. Paul Samson as MacPherson, whose respectability is a vicious lie, keeps his character closer to the edge. Bruce (Steven McNicoll) is the journalist with no conscience who suffers that nice, well-bred, immunity from actual violence until it happens to him. He wears carpet slippers to his sorry end. Kern Falconer as scarecrow Auld John is frighteningly at one with his pigs, as well as his scary mither up the ladder.

(l to r) Philip Cairns, SteveMcNicol, Josh Whitelaw

(l to r) Philip Cairns, Steve McNicol, Josh Whitelaw

However, ‘Kill Johnny Glendenning’ is more than an unhinged caper. One read of the imaginative programme and a glance at the stage curtain for a lookalike Amazon listing of tales from Bar-L will tell you that Jackson and director Mark Thomson are firing off some cultural bullet points. Hard men and hard boys are the obvious target but you could easily add sectarian shite, corruption of the press, Glasgow itself and mobile phone apps to that list. An entertaining, close-range blast from ‘Yes’ land.

Star (blue)Star (blue)Star (blue)Star (blue)

Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 20 September)

Visit Kill Johnny Glendenning’s homepage here.

THIS REVIEW HAS BEEN SUBEDITED

The Edinburgh49 Prize: for distinctive and memorable theatre (2014). Winners!

Posted in *Ratings, Features, Rated: Nae Bad, Rated: Outstanding, Rated: Unrated, The End of Normality 2014, Theatre by

outstanding

“CONGRATULATIONS!”

Editorial Rating: Outstanding

The winners of the first ever Edinburgh49 Prize: for distinctive & memorable theatre (sponsored by Alechemy Brewing) were announced on 10 July at our ‘End of Normality’ party held at Assembly Roxy.

The event marked the city’s transition into full-on Festivals mode and was a chance to celebrate all that’s weird and wonderful about the other 49 weeks in the arts calendar.

Not only did our sponsor, Alechemy Brewing of Livingstone, ensure that everyone was well watered throughout the night, they also provided the star prize for our winning pub quiz team, a powerful combination of Royal Lyceum’s marketing team and NTS producers, who received a chance to sample 11 bottles from across Alechemy’s range.

Despite on-going tours and pre-Fringe commitments, we were delighted to welcome so many friends old and new to join us for the official announcement of the 6 winning productions, chosen from the more than 75 shows reviewed by us since last September.

In date order, the winning shows are:

With special mention of The #1 Loch Ness Monster Experience performed by Bruce Morton and Karen Fraser Docherty at Edinburgh College, 24 June, 2014 as part of the National Theatre of Scotland’s The Great, Yes, No, 5 Minute Theatre Show.

Charlotte Productions celebrate the sucess of Goblin's Story in style.

Charlotte Productions celebrate the sucess of Goblin’s Story in style.

Many congratulations again to all the winners and many, many thanks again to all the companies, participants and venues who have made 2013-14 such a wonderful year with which to begin Edinburgh49. Our job for 2013-14 was to establish the title and prove it could endure from one Fringe to another. We’ve done that. Next year we’d like to expand our coverage into new genres – can you help us?

There are some incredibly talented individuals operating across the genres in this city. If you think you can help amplify word-of-mouth with passionate, peer-review style reviews which help producers and punters alike – please get in touch!

No more reviews for now, as we circle around the Fringe and live up to our name, but we will be back in September.

See you on the far side!

Alan, Richard & Dan

‘The Great Yes, No, Don’t Know 5 Minute Theatre Show (Edinburgh Coll’ege: 24 June ’14)

Posted in Theatre by
Loch Ness Monster Experience

Karen Fraser Docherty & Bruce Morton in Andrew Learmonth’s The #1 Loch Ness Monster Experience

“We’re waiting for applause from Dumfries.”

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad

“We’re waiting for applause from Dumfries” the words tumble down into the performance space from the AV desk, located up behind the cheap seats. These are the kind of words you should expect to hear, waiting for the next show to take to the virtual stage. Live performances are being streamed from seven live hubs across Scotland. The one we’re at is in the smart environs of Edinburgh College – the FE entity spliced from Stevenson, Jewel and Esk as well as Telford Colleges.

The long intervals between performances provides plenty of time for gazing, espresso in hand, at the car park. Look right and you see Granton Gasholder No. 1, still there, listed and historic. The Great Yes, No, Don’t Know 5 minute Theatre Show was the espressos, punchy flavours packed tightly into tiny wee cups. The intervals were the view, the neutral palate-cleansing glass of tap water with which to prepare for the next full taste.

We saw only five mini shows from the over 180 scheduled. We look forward to seeing how the National Theatre of Scotland intends to save and make available this ‘democratic, dramatic, response to the theme of independence’.

Vote with your Feet by Anita John moved its audience left/YES to right/NO across the stage, with the helpful Don’t Know white line down the middle. 39 questions or statements sorted the adventurous from the careful: ie. “Will you go to bed on the night of September 18th?”; “Will you pay for the removal of nuclear weapons from Scotland?”; “Should Alex Salmond receive a knighthood?” In other words, The Thirty Nine Steps … on the run to independence or no. Three seconds to decide.

The format was reminiscent of those Facebook memes which determine which George Orwell book you are (Burmese Days and Homage To Catalonia in our respective cases). If the hurried pace was intended to encourage conversation it failed. The only one of us who voted ‘no’ to the question “Will you vote on September 18th” would have liked to have explained that they have a postal vote.

Democracy, produced by John Naples-Campbell, narrated the recent rioting in Venezuela from the perspective of an expat Scot out there teaching. 3 student actors covered a nuanced spectrum ranging through concern, bewilderment, constant fear and immediate alarm. Technical difficulties meant that we saw the performance 3 times. It lost nothing in the retelling. In fact, rather like a John Constable landscape, new features emerged with each review.

Ade Oshineye stood still and told the desperate story of Ruby, fighting for her own survival (call it anguished independence at a stretch) and that of baby Pearl in The House Next Door. You have to wonder what the neighbours were doing. Part angry rap at incestuous violence, part offended lament that this could happen, its intensity was in Oshineye’s quiet telling. Clearly one to watch, Oshineye moved like a butterfly under his heavy load, delivering the drama with gracious gravity.

Student theatre is many things. Most often it’s anxious: body image, pollution, the bestial nature of beastliness. Free Wifi Available took on the ultra-contemporary concern that social media isolates. Is constant connectivity really permanent disconnection? No. Clearly a medium that allows friends and families, oceans and continents apart, to communicate freely, intimately and daily is no bad thing. But for the sake of the old skool mediums who have a commercial interest in bashing open access formats let’s pretend it is.

The movement and staging were bright, bold and effective. Square red tape boxes on the floor (a stage hand’s wet dream – perform in there and no where else) supercharged an atmosphere already made moody by traverse staging.

The #1 Loch Ness Monster Experience  by Andrew Learmonth is in Drumnadrochit after ‘Nessie’ has stomped it to pieces. The cuddly toy of the parcel shelf is nae mair. The tourist economy is wrecked or at least is looking for redefinition via Godzilla. Hamish and Agnes stand in what is left of their shop and dispute the consequences. It is very funny, wickedly canny, and brilliantly Scottish. The BBC should take it nationwide – that’s UK wide – late on the evening of September 17th.

We watched these few pieces in PASS (Edinburgh College’s Performing Arts Studio) and they demonstrated all the character and enthusiasm that an educational setting should provide and that the producers of The Great Yes, No, Don’t Know 5 minute Theatre Show could have wished for. Hopefully the full event realised their ambitious purpose.

The proof will be in how the material collected will be distributed. Will we be able to see each play online separately? Will we be able to see a profile of each participant? Yes, this was live theatre on a virtual stage, but no, that does not mean it cannot be revisited.

nae bad_blue

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Reviewers: Alan Brown & Dan Lentell (Seen 24 June)

Visit National Theatre of Scotland Yes, No, Don’t Know homepage here.

‘Tales of Correction’ (Vault: 31 May & 1 June ’14)

Posted in Other, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

Tales of Correction

‘Quite how to distinguish the proper from the improper is all to do.’

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad

“We are now returning to Edinburgh to get some preferment in the Acting way.”  From Love and Friendship (1790) by Jane Austen.

The Vault in Merchant Street is a good venue for Tales of Correction. It is hard by the garage of the Edinburgh Sheriff Court where prison vans deliver and collect. As it happens, and an awful lot does happen in these two short plays, the feckless, unfortunate Augustus in Love and Friendship does time in Newgate before being thrown out of an overturned carriage – and dying.

This Charlotte Productions double bill is a preview of the ‘project’ that this strong student born company is taking to the Jane Austen Festival in Bath in September where it is bound to be well received as both literary exercise and imaginative response.

Mansfield Presents is first on. We are in a cosy ‘back-stage’, back parlour space during on-off rehearsals of Lovers’ Vows, the actual society theatrical within-the-novel. As in Austen’s story, Fanny Price has a lot of needle-work to do and exactly as on-the-page(s) she has the admirable intelligence to stay quiet as all around her sound off. The red velveteen curtain is hung and the characters that matter are in place, costumes are just so, Rushworth’s sword has gone missing, and Maria is swooning over Henry Crawford. Edmund will, for sure, love Fanny and she him, but not yet. For the time being all the talk is of sexy subterfuge and Lovers’ Vows and of those related, tantalising questions: is it suitable for a private party (when ladies are present) and how does true delicacy show itself? Quite how to distinguish the proper from the improper is all to do.

Florence Bedell-Brill as Fanny is a study in self-possession; James Stewart, in wonderful voice as Mr Crawford, is the perfect gentleman for 1800, at least in her presence. Grace Knight as Mary Crawford provides the ringlets, wit and the fun whilst James Beagon and Jess Flood, as Edmund and Maria Bertram, embody good sense and trembling sensibility respectively. Leaving George Selwyn Sharpe – there’s a Regency name for you – as the loud buffoon in a cloak, which he inhabits handsomely.

The second play, Love and Friendship, with the same six actors, is writer Laura Witz’s adaptation of the 14 year old Austen’s parody of the sentimental novel. It is a glad, ludicrous and enjoyable piece where the broad comedy is still clever and effective. A melancholy cello plays on (ironically) while costumes change with bewildering speed from out of a suitcase and James Stewart, as an elm tree, sways in the wind that is George Selwyn Sharpe. Jess Flood narrates throughout and conveys just the right touch of wonder, incredulity and hand over breast excitement. Now it is Florence Bedell-Brill’s turn to swoon, which she does splendidly, taking Grace Knight down with her. James Beagon manages the rare double-act of coachman and pawing horse.

The two Tales of Correction are in order (i) heady, as in Think About This, because you should; and (ii) headlong, as in “Whoa!”, the wheels could come off. Well, they don’t because the direction, also by Laura Witz, is secure and the performances stay together.

Perhaps a young woman could review the plays in Bath. Laurie Penny would be my choice, echoing Edmund’s question in Chapter 15 of Mansfield Park, “But what do you do for women?”

 

nae bad_blue

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Reviewer: Alan Brown  (Seen 1 June)

Visit about Charlotte Productions here.

‘A Slow Air’ (King’s: 22 – 24 May ’14)

Posted in King's Theatre, Rated: Nae Bad, Theatre by

A Slow Air

‘Plainsong for our secular times’

Editorial Rating: Nae Bad

Written and directed by David Harrower.

As you listen to A Slow Air you applaud the art of storytelling. The Scottish Storytelling Centre on the Royal Mile is now contained within ‘Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland’. One day, sometime, David Harrower’s 2011 play will be in there and part of Scotland’s ‘rich story heritage’. Unaffected, moving, A Slow Air is that good.

For the time being Ayr based Borderline Theatre has brought this play to the King’s after touring it through 17 Scottish venues – and 1 Welsh. It is easily portable: two bentwood chairs on a slightly raised platform stage and three-fold back flats with opaque windows that admit white, blue, or amber light. Daniel Padden’s quiet sound design is pitch perfect – Celtic strings, viola (?) and piano. It all creates a spare, open, space for two actors and an exceptional script.

Morna and Athol are brother and sister who have not seen or spoken to one another for 14 years. She, a single mother, stays in Edinburgh, off the Dalry Road; he, with wife Evelyn, is out in Houston, Renfrewshire, fifteen minutes’ drive from Glasgow airport, which is significant because it is 2007, and a short while after a green Cherokee Jeep loaded with propane gas canisters was driven straight at the glass doors of the terminal building.

Joshua, Morna’s 20 year old son is fascinated by that attack, probably because it has already acquired the vivid colours of the graphic novels that he loves to read, the comic strip immediacy of his sketches and drawings. They may have been crap terrorists and anyway “fanatics are hard to draw” but unwitting uncle Athol had been inside their house to give an estimate for a floor tiling job. Joshua, never seen, always reported, has all the qualities of the eejit young artist: maddening, unpredictable, lovable. It is Joshua who, in wacky fashion, would bring Morna and Athol back together.

Brother and sister come forward and talk and explain in turn. Pauline Knowles is ballsy, defiant, Morna, who is just about holding it together, despite seriously hard breaks. Morna cleans for alliterated Rosie and Randolph in their massive house in the Grange and in their empty flat in the New Town. She hits on the idea of using the flat for Joshua’s 21st. Pure brilliant! Lewis Howden’s performance as Athol is more reflective, more crumpled than wired, but nonetheless absorbing. Athol hates golf but has to try and play it to get business. We are treated to one botched round. In sum, mellow ‘Let There Be Love’ by ‘Simple Minds’ for him; & ‘U2s’ provocative ‘Pride (In the Name of Love’) for Morna. Hence Joshua, of course.

It is the innate sense of grounded, familial, story that you get – and gets you. Athol narrates. Morna responds in kind. Parents rest on sofa suites and live safe behind their double-glazing. Place and locality are everywhere: on the bus over the Bridges, Dick Place, Craigiehall, the Black Bitch pub in Linlithgow. SupaSnaps stores are on the High Street and Atholl marvels that Joshua could sleep well on a budget IKEA mattress.

David Harrower is the writer of Blackbird (2005), a recent production of which was reviewed on this site as ‘Outstanding’. Plainsong for our secular times, A Slow Air, is gentler, but no less compelling.

 

nae bad_blue

Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 22 May)

Visit A Slow Air homepage here.

‘Pressure’ (Lyceum: 1 – 24 May ‘ 14)

Posted in Rated: Outstanding, The Lyceum, Theatre by

Pressure handbill

‘The clock counts down, isobars group, weather fronts advance’

Editorial Rating: Outstanding

A new play by David Haig. Directed by John Dove.

Pressure blows up a storm of anticipation. Remember the first handbill: warships steaming full ahead out of the binoculars and heading straight for you? If you have seen The Longest Day, the film about D-Day and the Normandy landings on June 6 1944 (but it helps if you’re over 50 and a boy), then remember that scene when a German officer adjusts his Zeiss lenses and sees the invasion force emerge through the dawn mist. Shock and awe big time! Impossible to create much the same on stage? Not if you can read a barometer and like the joke of employing a meteorologist to forecast shooting conditions for Gone with the Wind.

That was filming in 1939 in sunny LA County, whereas Pressure builds over four actual days in 1945 in Southwick House, near Portsmouth. US General Dwight D. Eisenhower is in command but depends upon a plumber’s son from Dalkeith to tell him what the weather is going to do. High winds mean high seas, overturned landing craft and limited air cover. Should he or should he not postpone? And, General, this is British weather we’re talking about.

Enter James Stagg PhD, RAF pro tem, ace meteorologist on tenterhooks. Cue very big charts, 5 to 6 low pressure systems, 2 high ones, flurries of weather reports, black Bakelite telephones, pots of caffeine and introduce the fact that beyond 24 to 36 hours the science of forecasting is all informed guesswork. Where, over there and by the way, are Rommel’s tank divisions? You grasp the fog of war.

The uncomplicated story takes hold very quickly. Stagg’s gloomy, inclement forecast is opposed by his American opposite number, trained in Beverley Hills and on the Italian beachheads. Lt. Kay Summersby and Eisenhower are an established item; conceivably a chaste one. The clock counts down, isobars group, weather fronts advance and Stagg suffers personal agonies of his own.

Writer David Haig is James Stagg and is a near elemental force. He stands awkwardly to attention in front of his commanders but provides reports of such detail that you … are blown away, as it were. This is a man, you sense, who cannot be sure that he is right but will move heaven and earth to move the odds in his favour.

In his life Eisenhower was a lucky general. Malcolm Sinclair plays him on a long fuse and a tight smile, unbowed by his massive responsibility and with a winning streak straight out of the end zone. It is a calm, light time (rare in Pressure) when Stagg tries to explain rugby football to the general who clearly will never understand why the ball is passed backwards.

Laura Rogers as Kay Summersby is a delight. The compassionate role moves her imperturbably to and fro between the five star general, whom she has known for two years, and the private, undemonstrative, scientist and allows both characters to open up. In this reading Summersby is probably David Haig at his most imaginative.

Director John Dove has those fine, clear- sighted Lyceum productions of Arthur Miller plays to his credit. In relation to this current production The Man Who Had All the Luck might as well be Eisenhower’s experience. In Pressure Dove succeeds not simply with pace and control but he also has stage actors in uniform to contend with, which weighs more significantly than civilian costume, and is never to be taken for granted. We are behind the lines, of course, but you never doubt that there is a war going on. There is just the one violent reminder when a plane goes ‘down’ and that seems a little unnecessary given the intensity of the on-stage action. Pressure is a taut, winning drama and you will appreciate the energy and skills of the creative team behind it, from blackout lighting to the drone of bomber formations.

It is, finally, David Haig’s play and is, I think, a major achievement. An exciting, dramatized, chronicle.

outstanding

Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 8 May)

Visit Pressure homepage here.

‘Uncle Varick’ (King’s: 7 – 10 May ’14)

Posted in King's Theatre, Rated: Unrated, Theatre by
l.to r. Willie John (Dave Anderson), Michael (George Anton) & Varick (Jimmy Chisholm) Photo: Richard Campbell

Willie John (Dave Anderson), Michael (George Anton) and Varick (Jimmy Chisholm). Photo: Richard Campbell

‘Inappropriate for Invergordon’

Editorial Rating: Unrated

“Don’t catch the sleeper. Stay at my place”, pleads Michael, Highlands GP, ardent ecologist and would-be lover. The married lady takes the train. So much for the ‘Swinging Sixties’.

Writer and artist John Byrne wrote Uncle Varick in 2004 and sets it in 1967 within a 20 room pile on a Highland estate, all dark wood panelling, tick-tock, and parlour room landscapes. This Rapture theatre production invites you to see it as if framed within a distressed gilt surround. Its parent, Chekhov’s Uncle Vania, subtitled Scenes from Country Life in Four Acts, and very much the choice soundboard of Byrne’s work was written in the Crimea, 1500k from Moscow where it was first performed in 1899. No mention of trains in the Chekhov, just horses to carry you between those fiendish, prime, poles of town / fabby and country /boring, ‘parochial’.

London is where Varick’s brother in law, overblown art critic Sandy, lives. First in Swiss Cottage, then in Maida Vale, but now – the impression gathers certainty – it is all proving too expensive and he finds himself cash poor, on painful legs, and has only the estate to sell. Only it’s not quite his to sell. He would have investment income and a small villa in Majorca. Of course he would, just as Chekhov’s retired professor, another Alexander, would have his wee dacha in Finland. Michael, once Mihail Astrov, has a map of the estate as it was fifty years ago – in 1917 or 1849, as you will – that charts a picture of decay as the old ways give out to be replaced by … by what exactly?

And so the doubling continues between the uncles, Vania and Varick. Byrne’s idea is canny and pretty neat but now, only ten years on, it appears a little forced, a little hung up. For all their appeal, the Scottish characters approach caricature: there’s Kirsty Morag, the old housekeeper and sweet guardian of Scots, as in ‘muckle chainsaw, ken?’ and kind Willie John in cap, sporting breeks and Fairisle sweater. He plays sweet guitar though and sings three great and apposite Beatles songs from Rubber Soul (1965). A dun, knee length pleated skirt out of Dingwall Drapers opposes a showy 60s minidress from Lady Jane’s in Carnaby Street; bold is not the word for that hemline. Inappropriate for Invergordon would do.

But there’s wild haired Jimmy Chisholm as Byrne’s Varick and he is well beyond naïve portraiture. Kirsty Morag would call him pawky. It’s a quick, spry, part that is both entertaining and woebegone. Chisholm may be dressed in baggy cords or pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers but that will not divert you from the nippy spirit of his performance. His opposition to vainglorious and impossible brother-in-law Sandy, is at Vania / Varick’s heart and while you just want Sandy to get ‘orf’ and away back to London (so strong is John Stahl in the part) you do enjoy Chisholm’s performance.

Varick is heartbroken as well, which just adds crummy self-esteem to injustice. No requited love for him from Elaine (Selina Boyack), Sandy’s second wife. When Shona (Ashley Smith), Varick’s niece and all-round lovely person, sings Cry Me a River you know the emotional landscape is unrelieved and forlorn. In such a place it is Michael, a poignantly lucid George Anton, whom you notice and listen to.

There are amusing moments: smile at the use of flock wallpaper and laugh at a couple of funny break-out lunacies – but otherwise Uncle Varick is more serious and contemplative than you might think. Can it bring Ross and Cromarty, with its estimated population of 50,000, to Greater London’s 9 million? Perish the thought! All we do have in definite motion in 2014 is the Invitation to Tender for a separate Caledonian Sleeper Service ‘in order … to develop a transformed product offering that will secure its future as a sustainable business.’ Well, all the more reason for Elaine to refuse Michael’s bed.

 

Reviewer: Alan Brown (Seen 7 May)

Visit Uncle Varick homepage here.