Skip to main content

Whatever Gets You Through The Night

The Arches, Glasgow
4 stars
AS the Spice Girls head to the West End with their jukebox musical, director Cora Bissett unveils a lo-fi compendium of after-hours confections which I would be prepared to bet reveals an altogether more fascinating and challenging understanding of contemporary musical theatre. By bringing together some of this country’s hippest avant-pop songwriters with a set of actors and writers fully at ease with mixing up artforms as well as moods for this Vital Spark commission, Bissett has taken the musical back to its fringe roots in a glorious mix of domestic sentimentalism and old school grit. All with the odd slice of fantastical ridiculousness thrown in for good measure.

It opens with a couple on a cosy sofa recalling the first time they met, which could have been last night or a lifetime ago. From first love to last rites, this launches us on an emotional travelogue that takes us from club-land largesse, wasted youth, missed buses and the company of strangers, to online dating, sleepless nights and the confessions of an East European Eliza Doolittle.

With filmed back-drops, aerial pas de deux and lovely central performances from Frances Thorburn and John Kielty dove-tailing messily across four stages, such a dramatic patchwork sometimes resembles a late 1990s ensemble rom-com. Written contributions from ten writers including David Greig, Annie Griffin and Kieran Hurley complement generation-hopping new songs played mainly live by a large house-band that includes Ricky Ross, Emma Pollock and Dan Willson (aka Withered Hand). There’s real heart to this poignant and touchingly funny series of musical snapshots of how we live now.

The Herald, June 29th 2012

ends
 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art School Dance Goes On Forever – Snapshots Of Masters Of The Multiverse

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…
Post a Comment
Read more

Peter Brook – The Prisoner

Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata, to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990 had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival.
Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow.
Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residency has alr…
Post a Comment
Read more

Martin McCormick – Ma, Pa and the Little Mouths

Family life is everything to Martin McCormick. The actor turned writer is having an increasingly high profile as a playwright, with his biggest play to date, Ma, Pa and the Little Mouths, opening this week at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in a production in association with the National Theatre of Scotland as part of the Tron’s Mayfesto season. While his own domestic life with his wife, actress Kirsty Stuart, who is currently appearing in Frances Poet’s play, Gut, at the Traverse in Edinburgh, and their two children, sounds a hectic whirl of of juggling schedules, it is nothing like the world he has created for his play.
“I always knew it was going to be about two older people who’d experienced some kind of trauma and grief,” says McCormick, “but whatever it is that they’ve been through, it’s all in the background. They’re suppressing it, and there’s all this claustrophobia caused by all these suppressed emotions they’re going through while being stuck in this room. I guess all that came…
Post a Comment
Read more