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
Adam Smith Theatre,
Kirkcaldy Four Stars
It’s a case of whoops, there goes the neighbourhood twice over in Rapture Theatre’s revival of Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which opens in 1959 in the same Chicago suburb where Lorraine Hansberry’s drama, A Raisin in the Sun, which appeared that year, is set. Here, Robin Kingsland’s Russ and his wife Bev, played by Jackie Morrison, are preparing to move out of their now almost empty des-res following a family tragedy.
Unknown to them, the bargain basement price tag has enabled a black family to move in, with Jack Lord’s uptight Karl a self-appointed spokesperson for the entire ‘hood. Russ and Bev’s black maid Francine (Adelaide Obeng) and her husband Albert (Vinta Morgan), meanwhile, bear witness to a barrage of everyday racism. Fast forward half a century, and a white family are trying to buy the same house, albeit with a heap of proposed changes which the black couple representing the block’s now much more diverse community aren’t…
It’s a case of whoops, there goes the neighbourhood twice over in Rapture Theatre’s revival of Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which opens in 1959 in the same Chicago suburb where Lorraine Hansberry’s drama, A Raisin in the Sun, which appeared that year, is set. Here, Robin Kingsland’s Russ and his wife Bev, played by Jackie Morrison, are preparing to move out of their now almost empty des-res following a family tragedy.
Unknown to them, the bargain basement price tag has enabled a black family to move in, with Jack Lord’s uptight Karl a self-appointed spokesperson for the entire ‘hood. Russ and Bev’s black maid Francine (Adelaide Obeng) and her husband Albert (Vinta Morgan), meanwhile, bear witness to a barrage of everyday racism. Fast forward half a century, and a white family are trying to buy the same house, albeit with a heap of proposed changes which the black couple representing the block’s now much more diverse community aren’t…
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