Botanic Gardens, Glasgow “It’s like Wimbledon,” shouts one wag mid-way through the second half of Jennifer Dick’s production of Shakespeare’s island-set elegy, as a ground-sheet is dragged across the set after the show is halted two thirds of the way in once the rain starts. If ever there was a more appropriate play for the annual Bard in the Botanics season of open-air theatre, The Tempest is it. It’s a shame that the unseasonal elements have been against it to the extent that completing the play before the heavens open has been rare. Because there is much to praise about Dick’s approach, which, by concentrating on the play’s magical aspects, looks and feels like some long lost off-cut from spectral film-maker Kenneth Anger’s archive. This effect is accentuated by a cast whose faces are made up in white, and who, when not onstage, observe proceedings as if peering into some celestial looking-glass. As he conjures up an imaginary storm on Giggy Argo’s wooden shipwreck of a set, Stephen Clyde’s Prospero pulls the strings even more than usual, even if much of it plods shapelessly along. By all accounts, the last half hour of Dick’s production is where Dick's concept really comes into its own, as pretty much all of what’s gone before is revealed to be the isolated imaginings of a Prospero adrift from the real world. This sounds like a fascinatingly poignant construction that makes total sense of the previous longeurs. Sadly, since last Saturday when the ground-sheets were pulled over the set, real life storms have prevented Prospero’s magic from even beginning their flights of fancy. If the fates allow, this weekend’s final two scheduled shows may survive yet. The Herald, July 6th 2012 ends
Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
1
In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.
This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.
The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.
The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
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