The Arches, Glasgow
4 stars
The strength of the annual Arches Award For Stage Directors is in its purpose. Even with added gloss from its partners at The Traverse Theatre and National Theatre Of Scotland, the event’s fanfare remains low-key, its risks unhyped. It’s interesting to note too that this year’s recipients both focus on writers, albeit in different ways. Then again, a soothing mug of hot chocolate plays an equally significant part in both works.
Cora Bissett, best-known as an actress, has adapted Amada from Isabel Allende’s slip of a short story, Simple Maria using devising techniques to breathe life into a tale where the physical is already paramount. For the second piece, Rosie Kellagher may have opted to work with debut playwright Hugo Plowden on Mother, Father, Son, but if anything indulges in even more audacious flights of fancy than Bissett.
Amada follows the life and times of Maria, who embarks in a trainwreck of a life following an injury that sees her lurch into a vivacious, permanently child-like state. Prone to unfettered, precociously sexualised cravings for affection, she embarks on an innocent’s voyage that sees her end her days as a legendary prostitute. It would be tragic if Maria didn’t put so much faith I finding the little bit of love she lost so long ago.
Performed by Monica Bertei, who literally throws herself into the role, and framed by Anita Vettesse and Harry Ward in multiple roles, this would be poignant enough. Throw into the mix Galvarino Ceron-Carrasco’s evocative Spanish guitar flourishes and the stunning Basque singing of Nerea Bello, and the accompanying shadowplay gives the impression of an adult fairytale as viewed through a pin-hole camera in Bissett’s sensitively realised and impressive debut.
If Amada is about desperately seeking something, Mother, Father, Son is its nihilistic flipside, permanently in denial. Inspired by the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori, whereby grown me who should know better lock themselves away from their parents, Plowden and Kellagher have reimagined such a state of emotional torpor in the sort of couthy suburban houses where old people go to die. Here the eponymous parents go through their daily routine, waiting on their unseen offspring, while behind closed doors he appears to be committing slow hari-kari.
There’s a quirkily mannered oddness to Plowden’s text, born somewhere between Miss Marple’s village green, Harold Pinter reimagining Hammer horror and Ivor Cutler’s fruitily accented Scotch Sitting Room. There are nods too, in its darkly projected interludes, to even scarier films from Japan, such as The Ring. This dry macabre streak never overplays its hand, however, in what is essentially a thoroughly nasty black comedy.
Kellagher gets both the physical detail right as well as the sense of emotional politesse as everybody goes quietly mad in an equally auspicious arrival. Played by Ann-Scott Jones, Peter Kelly and the offstage Ben Hitchens as the Son, never has the phrase, ‘like father, like son’ seemed so appropriate, so dysfunctional and so magnificently wrong as it does here. Not even hot chocolate can help now.
The Herald, April 10th 2007
ends
4 stars
The strength of the annual Arches Award For Stage Directors is in its purpose. Even with added gloss from its partners at The Traverse Theatre and National Theatre Of Scotland, the event’s fanfare remains low-key, its risks unhyped. It’s interesting to note too that this year’s recipients both focus on writers, albeit in different ways. Then again, a soothing mug of hot chocolate plays an equally significant part in both works.
Cora Bissett, best-known as an actress, has adapted Amada from Isabel Allende’s slip of a short story, Simple Maria using devising techniques to breathe life into a tale where the physical is already paramount. For the second piece, Rosie Kellagher may have opted to work with debut playwright Hugo Plowden on Mother, Father, Son, but if anything indulges in even more audacious flights of fancy than Bissett.
Amada follows the life and times of Maria, who embarks in a trainwreck of a life following an injury that sees her lurch into a vivacious, permanently child-like state. Prone to unfettered, precociously sexualised cravings for affection, she embarks on an innocent’s voyage that sees her end her days as a legendary prostitute. It would be tragic if Maria didn’t put so much faith I finding the little bit of love she lost so long ago.
Performed by Monica Bertei, who literally throws herself into the role, and framed by Anita Vettesse and Harry Ward in multiple roles, this would be poignant enough. Throw into the mix Galvarino Ceron-Carrasco’s evocative Spanish guitar flourishes and the stunning Basque singing of Nerea Bello, and the accompanying shadowplay gives the impression of an adult fairytale as viewed through a pin-hole camera in Bissett’s sensitively realised and impressive debut.
If Amada is about desperately seeking something, Mother, Father, Son is its nihilistic flipside, permanently in denial. Inspired by the Japanese phenomenon of Hikikomori, whereby grown me who should know better lock themselves away from their parents, Plowden and Kellagher have reimagined such a state of emotional torpor in the sort of couthy suburban houses where old people go to die. Here the eponymous parents go through their daily routine, waiting on their unseen offspring, while behind closed doors he appears to be committing slow hari-kari.
There’s a quirkily mannered oddness to Plowden’s text, born somewhere between Miss Marple’s village green, Harold Pinter reimagining Hammer horror and Ivor Cutler’s fruitily accented Scotch Sitting Room. There are nods too, in its darkly projected interludes, to even scarier films from Japan, such as The Ring. This dry macabre streak never overplays its hand, however, in what is essentially a thoroughly nasty black comedy.
Kellagher gets both the physical detail right as well as the sense of emotional politesse as everybody goes quietly mad in an equally auspicious arrival. Played by Ann-Scott Jones, Peter Kelly and the offstage Ben Hitchens as the Son, never has the phrase, ‘like father, like son’ seemed so appropriate, so dysfunctional and so magnificently wrong as it does here. Not even hot chocolate can help now.
The Herald, April 10th 2007
ends
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