Glasgay!@The Arches, Glasgow
3 stars
As double acts go, Tennessee Williams and Vivien Leigh, who played the soused-up playwright’s definitive Blanche DuBois, were a match made in heaven. Or somewhere very much like it in Derek McLuckie’s audacious biographical homage, which opens Glasgay! 2008’s theatrical programme. Set ostensibly in a hotel suite during the great man’s final years, but more likely inside Williams’ head, the result is a crazed stylistic cocktail which, as with its subject matter, makes some seriously wacked-out diversions before running out of steam with gleeful abandon.
As Grant Smeaton’s Tenn free-forms his way through his own back pages on his beloved typewriter in some belated and desperate drive towards a definition of himself, the white-coated demons wait to pounce. Both he and Pauline Goldsmith’s magnificently demented Viv are looking for a comeback gig, but as long as the ghosts of Tenn’s mother and lobotomised sister Rose haunt him, all that comes out is doggerel. Here, Tenn’s mother is embodied as a man inhabiting the skeleton of a ball-gown, while Rose is a pretty-boy angel with his celestial hand permanently between his legs. The accompanying chorus, meanwhile, come on like Jean Genet sailor boys reinventing show tunes for some old-time vaudeville show.
Which, in effect, is what McLuckie has cooked up from this loosely-knitted compendium of versified set-pieces and pop-video visuals. In spirit, it resembles the sort of multi-layered work produced by Neil Bartlett with his Gloria company in the 1980s. Which, for all its relentless verve, makes for an old-fashioned show, which, by the time it wheels Tenn off to chat show hell and has him referencing Vietnam, makes for an exhausting ride.
The Herald, October 16th 2008
ends
3 stars
As double acts go, Tennessee Williams and Vivien Leigh, who played the soused-up playwright’s definitive Blanche DuBois, were a match made in heaven. Or somewhere very much like it in Derek McLuckie’s audacious biographical homage, which opens Glasgay! 2008’s theatrical programme. Set ostensibly in a hotel suite during the great man’s final years, but more likely inside Williams’ head, the result is a crazed stylistic cocktail which, as with its subject matter, makes some seriously wacked-out diversions before running out of steam with gleeful abandon.
As Grant Smeaton’s Tenn free-forms his way through his own back pages on his beloved typewriter in some belated and desperate drive towards a definition of himself, the white-coated demons wait to pounce. Both he and Pauline Goldsmith’s magnificently demented Viv are looking for a comeback gig, but as long as the ghosts of Tenn’s mother and lobotomised sister Rose haunt him, all that comes out is doggerel. Here, Tenn’s mother is embodied as a man inhabiting the skeleton of a ball-gown, while Rose is a pretty-boy angel with his celestial hand permanently between his legs. The accompanying chorus, meanwhile, come on like Jean Genet sailor boys reinventing show tunes for some old-time vaudeville show.
Which, in effect, is what McLuckie has cooked up from this loosely-knitted compendium of versified set-pieces and pop-video visuals. In spirit, it resembles the sort of multi-layered work produced by Neil Bartlett with his Gloria company in the 1980s. Which, for all its relentless verve, makes for an old-fashioned show, which, by the time it wheels Tenn off to chat show hell and has him referencing Vietnam, makes for an exhausting ride.
The Herald, October 16th 2008
ends
Comments