SECC, Glasgow
3 stars
The just announced Live Earth concert suggests the old eco-warrior mantra that small is beautiful has given way to a bigger is better mentality. Hence Suspect Culture’s latest show opening at the most soul-less and acoustically challenged barn on the planet, as if demonstrating how life itself can be sucked from a venue.
If Bob Dylan, playing next door in a display of first night serendipity, can rise to the occasion, this co-production with The National Theatre Of Scotland can too. Especially as this pseudo-conference-cabaret incorporates clowning, contortionism, tangos, torch ballads and full-on song and dance routines to explore the private lives and secret selves of delegates in the otherwise arid vacuum of this imagined climate change debate.
Angela de Castro’s hick Sandwich Islands delegate is the pivot on which we’re led through a morass of proposals, promises, and possibilities inbetween après-conference activities and illicit away-day liaisons. The ongoing arrangement between Grant Smeaton’s cheesy comic Mayor and his tight-lipped, Eva Braun-like assistant, deliciously played by Morag Stark, is an especially sad morning after.
Pulled together by director Graham Eatough, writers David Greig and Dan Reballato alongside a welter of company associates guiding the eight performers and four-piece band, when Futurology steps out of itself, it’s a magnificent comic microcosm of how we live now. Raphaelle Boitel’s gymnastic displays and Maria Victoria Di Pace’s dancing are particularly eye-catching mind-flips that think outside the box, while Sharon Smith’s ventriloquist’s dummy Tobago to Calum Cuthbertson’s Trinidad suggests Susannah York’s similar turn in 1960s film, The Killing Of Sister George.
One can’t help but wish, however, for the dichotomy between the formal and the fantastical to be rougher. More Phoenix Nights razzle-dazzle, and less centres of excellence box-ticking, and the world might really be changed for the better.
The herald, April 13th 2007
ends
3 stars
The just announced Live Earth concert suggests the old eco-warrior mantra that small is beautiful has given way to a bigger is better mentality. Hence Suspect Culture’s latest show opening at the most soul-less and acoustically challenged barn on the planet, as if demonstrating how life itself can be sucked from a venue.
If Bob Dylan, playing next door in a display of first night serendipity, can rise to the occasion, this co-production with The National Theatre Of Scotland can too. Especially as this pseudo-conference-cabaret incorporates clowning, contortionism, tangos, torch ballads and full-on song and dance routines to explore the private lives and secret selves of delegates in the otherwise arid vacuum of this imagined climate change debate.
Angela de Castro’s hick Sandwich Islands delegate is the pivot on which we’re led through a morass of proposals, promises, and possibilities inbetween après-conference activities and illicit away-day liaisons. The ongoing arrangement between Grant Smeaton’s cheesy comic Mayor and his tight-lipped, Eva Braun-like assistant, deliciously played by Morag Stark, is an especially sad morning after.
Pulled together by director Graham Eatough, writers David Greig and Dan Reballato alongside a welter of company associates guiding the eight performers and four-piece band, when Futurology steps out of itself, it’s a magnificent comic microcosm of how we live now. Raphaelle Boitel’s gymnastic displays and Maria Victoria Di Pace’s dancing are particularly eye-catching mind-flips that think outside the box, while Sharon Smith’s ventriloquist’s dummy Tobago to Calum Cuthbertson’s Trinidad suggests Susannah York’s similar turn in 1960s film, The Killing Of Sister George.
One can’t help but wish, however, for the dichotomy between the formal and the fantastical to be rougher. More Phoenix Nights razzle-dazzle, and less centres of excellence box-ticking, and the world might really be changed for the better.
The herald, April 13th 2007
ends
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