Skip to main content

Venus as A Boy / Believe / The Yellowjacket - Edinburgh Fringe 2007

Venus As A Boy
Traverse Theatre
5 stars
Imagine a world where the healing powers of sex allow the entire world to see stars, and race-hate and homophobia are all but cured with Cupid’s kiss. Luke Sutherland did in his remarkable 2004 novella, in which an Orkney born ne’er do-well finds himself blessed with just such powers. Now Tam Dean Burn’s stage adaptation, performed by himself with live musical accompaniment by Sutherland in a production developed by the National Theatre Of Scotland Workshop in association with Burn’s newly constituted Burnt Goods label, has blessed it into some kind of afterlife.

Opening with a chatty double-bluffing pre-amble, Burn becomes Cupid, a golden boy whose quest to replace the first love who first woke him into pure pleasure seeking bliss leads him from Orkney’s brutal insularity to big-city bed-sit-land. He finally hits the self-destruct button with the beautiful losers on the Soho scene.

History is in there too, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the near apocalypse of 9/11, making sexual ecstasy an even more pertinent way of getting out of it in such an unforgiving world.

Burn and Sutherland, with co-director Christine Devaney, have created a rare thing of profundity and beauty that mixes the trans-gendered and the transcendent in a rare brush with wisdom through excess. Burn alone is a revelation, pushing way beyond his actors comfort zone to be all but unrecognisable in a masterly and heart-wrenching display of no-holds-barred, naked and emotionally fearless story-telling. Sutherland’s bowed guitar and violin loops pulse throughout, a sooth-saying chamber score resembling Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s more reflective refrains.

Lizzie Powell’s lighting frames this beautifully, bathing Pamela McBain’s glad-rag costumes. By the end, Burn is swathed in such iridescent finery as to resemble an escapee from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising if he had soaked himself in love juice and shot his bolt over all the sleeping lonely-hearts in search of love. Heartbreaking, audacious and outrageous, Venus As A Boy remains as holy as its source.

Believe
Traverse Theatre
3 stars
Everyone knows the best bits in the Bible are in the Old Testament, where all the blood, gore and mucky bits are buried. Which is why its yarns of begetting and be-heading are such a great gift to dramatists. Especially, it seems, when it concerns women at war. Matthew Hurt’s compendium of four portraits of these grand dames of theological literature is a gift too for Linda Marlowe, who performs each with trademark dynamism and verve in a semi-contemporised delivery.

Rahab is a hard-as-nails whore plying her wares in a war-zone. Bathsheba’s cut-glass but frustrated officer’s wife could have stepped straight from some bosom-heaving Noel Coward propaganda flick had she not given in to temptation. Judith, already made flesh in Howard Barker’s eponymous 1990s play, is a fiery and calculating dervish, while Hannah remains quietly defiant in her faith.

From storm to calm and back again, Marlowe’s every emotional sinew is on show in a hand-on-heart confessional that puts faith in the frontline in a way that suggests God’s hand was blessed with a woman’s touch.

The Yellowjacket
Collective Gallery@Traverse 3@University Of Edinburgh Drill Hall
Long before digital special FX allowed lycra-costumed musclemen and similarly clad Amazons to leap tall buildings with a single bound, super-hero serials were a staple of the early days of wireless. Writer and performer Brian Dewan puts his own eccentric slant on the era with this recorded reading of a post-modern pastiche. Dewan, along with poet John Hegley, actress Christine Entwisle and the mysterious but well-turned Sir Gideon Vein, usher us into the far-off planet a long time past, where insect-inspired heroes and villains slug it out in-between revealing their secret origins, and sometimes their identities too. Normal service is only resumed following the numerous public announcements by the all-seeing Self reference Centre and the election of a pink king.

Forming part of The Collective Gallery’s cross-discipline Comic Book Project, its delightfully silly, throwaway stuff. Its possibly lysergically inspired world of creepy-crawlies would give William Burroughs’ story, Exterminator, a run for its money in what is, to revive a very retro-futuristic parlance, decidedly zany. Especially with Dewan setting the scene with a trio of accordion-led ditties concerning such matters as the loneliness of the letter ‘O.’ If Sesamie Street ever went Yankee-doodle music hall, this is what it would sound like.
.
Preceded and accompanied by a four piece band playing the sort of Ragtime that probably hasn’t been heard in The Traverse since it occupied its original James Court residence, this is a one-off Fringe happening you’ll live to regret missing.

Run ended. The Comic Book Project, Collective Gallery until September 15, with events at Edinburgh International Film Festival on August 23, and Edinburgh International Book festival on August 26

The Herald, august 2007

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) ...