Theatre Royal, Glasgow 3 stars It may be more than thirty years since Willy Russell’s Thatcher-era two-hander of working-class aspiration first appeared, but, with higher education once again becoming the preserve of a privileged elite, there’s an accidental poignancy to what is essentially a platonic rom-com with knobs on. Tamara Harvey’s touring production, co-produced by the Chocolate Factory and Theatre Royal Bath, nails its Scouse colours to the mast from the off by using orchestral instrumental versions of Beatles songs as pre-show music. When pop got ideas above its station in this way and went classical, the legion of mop-topped auto-didacts that came out of the closet were clearly kin of Russell’s Rita. Claire Sweeney is almost too perfectly cast as the gobby hairdresser who breezes into the book-lined study of clapped-out Open University lecturer Frank, played with warm-hearted diffidence by Matthew Kelly. As they move through a succession of 1980s cosy cardies, there’s a knowing brio in the pair’s exchanges that captures Russell’s sense of cross-class co-dependency, even as the student outgrows her teacher. Having brought each other back to life, if Frank is a pickled hangover of a more patrician era, one only hopes Rita doesn’t lose her common touch to some of the era’s more materialistic pursuits beyond knowledge. While on one level Russell’s play is a rose-tinted time capsule of a more open British education system, it also offers a glimpse of what is – or was – possible. One still can’t help but wonder about all the latter-day Ritas who slip through the net. Perhaps they don’t have the hunger of Russell’s heroine. Or perhaps they just weren’t given the chance to change themselves enough to find their voice. The Herald, May 30th2012 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
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