The Arches, Glasgow
3 stars
Sex, violence and other not so cheap thrills have long provided outlets for corruptible youth in search of unknown pleasures. That’s certainly the case in this double bill of work provided by 2008’s winners of the Arches award For Stage Directors. Seen back to back, two very different rites of passage nevertheless suggest a bleakly inquiring collective psyche at play.
Rob Drummond’s Sixteen invites us to a coming of age party for the absent Sara, who plans to celebrate the occasion by having sex with her older boyfriend Tony. He sits downstairs with Sara’s Mum and Dad, who age has withered into a frustrated impasse of sexual dysfunction and double entendres. Played in real time in the hour leading up to midnight, the increasingly oddball exchanges reveal Drummond as the latest purveyor of nouveau absurdism made all the ickier by being seen in domestic close-up.
The Severed Head Of Comrade Bukhari is even nastier, as second winner Daljinder Singh takes the script by Oliver Emanuel she provided the idea for down even darker alleys. No wonder the four black-shirted youths killing time in the local underpass on the hottest Bank holiday for years reference Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. When the opportunity for easy sex arises, their studied languor gives way to shocking revelations, all sound-tracked by a jukebox medley of rock and roll rebellion which adds a tad too much novelty value. Singh sets up a series of moodily punctuated set-pieces that Fassbinder would be proud of in its ennui-spattered outbursts. Both this and Sixteen suggest tomorrow’s theatre makers already occupy the refreshingly strangest of places.
The Herald, April 10th 2008
ends
3 stars
Sex, violence and other not so cheap thrills have long provided outlets for corruptible youth in search of unknown pleasures. That’s certainly the case in this double bill of work provided by 2008’s winners of the Arches award For Stage Directors. Seen back to back, two very different rites of passage nevertheless suggest a bleakly inquiring collective psyche at play.
Rob Drummond’s Sixteen invites us to a coming of age party for the absent Sara, who plans to celebrate the occasion by having sex with her older boyfriend Tony. He sits downstairs with Sara’s Mum and Dad, who age has withered into a frustrated impasse of sexual dysfunction and double entendres. Played in real time in the hour leading up to midnight, the increasingly oddball exchanges reveal Drummond as the latest purveyor of nouveau absurdism made all the ickier by being seen in domestic close-up.
The Severed Head Of Comrade Bukhari is even nastier, as second winner Daljinder Singh takes the script by Oliver Emanuel she provided the idea for down even darker alleys. No wonder the four black-shirted youths killing time in the local underpass on the hottest Bank holiday for years reference Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. When the opportunity for easy sex arises, their studied languor gives way to shocking revelations, all sound-tracked by a jukebox medley of rock and roll rebellion which adds a tad too much novelty value. Singh sets up a series of moodily punctuated set-pieces that Fassbinder would be proud of in its ennui-spattered outbursts. Both this and Sixteen suggest tomorrow’s theatre makers already occupy the refreshingly strangest of places.
The Herald, April 10th 2008
ends
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