Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars There’s something of the Wild West in Martin Travers’ brutally intense play that is the flagship production of the National Theatre of Scotland’s Reveal 2012 season of new work. It’s not just the long leather coats and customised bowler hats that give Amanda Gaughan’s production the sort of rough-shod stylistic trappings that Sam Pekinpah would be proud of. As the play’s quartet of transients seek sanctuary in the gloom beneath a crossing they’re seemingly destined not to make, it’s the sense of a frontier lost to things not of their own making that gives it such a widescreen feel. All the more remarkable, then, that Travers has set his brooding tale of bargains made and secrets spilled in rural Lanarkshire in what he calls ‘another Scotland’. It’s a place where the brave new world that was promised presumably never happened, and where Ryan Fletcher’s ruthless Robert John and John Kielty’s more humane Andrew live off scraps in-between burning the corpses of the plague victims that surround them. The bridge may be their fortress, but it’s a natural beacon too for Helen Mallon’s whey-faced Catherine and her guardian, Craw, played with raggedy guile by Myra McFadyen. When both Craw and Catherine’s baby are afflicted, it forces Catherine into actions that may help her survive into near domestic bliss, but which will have long-term consequences for all. It’s a dense and claustrophobic landscape Travers and Gaughan have mapped out. The language is an arcane melding of flamboyant richness with something unflinchingly coarse. As the actors relish in the grit of the rarely-heard demotic that punctuates the play’s near Hardeyesque scenario, a major new voice might just have been heard. The Herald, May 7th 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
Comments