A Midsummer Night's Dream – Botanic Gardens
3 stars
Why Do You Stand There In the Rain ?– C – 3 stars
Besides The Obvious – C – 3 stars
Shopping Centre – Gilded Balloon – 4 stars
From the moment a gaggle of day-glo painted sprites lead the audience
gathered at the Botanics Gardens North gate through all manner of
exotic flora and fauna, its clear that Scottish Youth Theatre's first
ever visit to Edinburgh is a punky, spunky junk-shop take on
Shakespeare's evergreen rom-com, A Midsummer Night's Dream. As
Peaseblossom, Cobweb and all the rest giggle, skip and frolic in the
long grass en route to what they as celestial debutantes describe as a
party, we duly promenade to the pool outside Inverleith House, where
Fraser MacLeod's playful production begins. A stripy-blazered cyclist
pulls a small, lead-adorned truck with a mini sound system inside, and
the fairies dance some more.
As we move around already sumptuous-looking gardens dressed up even
more by designer Kenny Miller, Titania morphs into a back-combed Mary
Queen of Scots, while Ross Brown's original score,sounds like the
missing link between Godspell and the Wicker Man. Even with the walking
required between locations, the whole thing clocks in at just over
ninety minutes, and is performed with abandoned gusto by a cast of more
than twenty.
If there is actually too much wandering and too much of a hodge-podge
in terms of sight-lines, there are some lovely touches, including a
principal boy/girl as Lysander, a clever use of recorded voices played
through hand-held speakers as Puck dupes all about him and a rare
exuberance that more than justifies this truncated version's 'Twisted
Shakespeare' strapline. Beyond the main action, it's the fairies who
are rather oddly the show's force of nature. As the finale closes with
a merry dance somewhere between the Dying Fly and the Timewarp, it's
clear there's still plenty of life after dark at a party which, for
MacLeod's young cast, has clearly only just begun.
There's more singing in Why Do You Stand There in the Rain?, Peter
Arnott's new play written for students at Pepperdine University in
Malibu, California as part of a Scots/US exchange programme. In Cathy
Thomas-Grant's production, however, the tunes have more of a polemical
bent. Arnott tells the story of the Bonus Army, a hidden but crucial
part of America's radical history, when thousands of poverty-stricken
World War One veterans marched en masse to the White House, occupying
Washington for three months.
If such a story sounds familiar in today's war on terror age, in
Arnott's hands, it's probably meant to. By tapping into such a rich
seam of source material as well as folk songs from the era, Arnott and
Thomas-Grant have created a box-car pageant that is effectively an
American take on Oh What A Lovely War by way of Clifford Odets' Waiting
For Lefty and The Grapes of Wrath. In making his point, Arnott even
initiates some buddy-style solidarity between a young firebrand and a
contemporary who's essentially had his brains blown out. Anyone who
still believes that marching doesn't change anything should join up for
this post-haste.
Beside the Obvious is a far more intimate new play by Cameron Forbes,
who brings two very different brothers together for an uneasy reunion.
Eddie is a seemingly successful lawyer in the family firm, Daniel a
soft-touch artist turned police photographer who escaped the nest for
reasons only alluded to in a series of cryptic, quick-fire exchanges.
As the sirens in Eddie's head become more pronounced, it's clear that
Daniel has a heap of evidence to call Eddie.
Forbes developed his script with fellow graduates of Edinburgh Napier
University and Queen Margaret University's Acting for Stage and Screen
Course, and produced it via the alliance of New Celt Productions and
41st 92nd Theatre Company. It's an ambitious if at times overloaded
first effort, which adopts the clipped speech patterns and implied
menaces of Pinter and Mamet. There are echoes too, in its depiction of
families ripped asunder, of David Storey's In Celebration, albeit with
an in-yer-face hangover.
While both Sean Langtree as Eddie and David Edment as Daniel spar
convincingly, at just over half an hour, Forbes' text needs to be
fleshed out, even as some of the more contrived lines need to be
excised. The play's dark intentions are all there, however, in a short,
sharp shocker announcing a new voice to watch.
Also a bit messed up is Jim, the camouflage trousered, track-suit
topped socio-path in Shopping Centre, Matthew Osborn's blisteringly
incisive dissection of the broken Britain David Cameron's Big Society
became. We first encounter Jim dragging an unconscious security guard
into his basement lair in the precinct he's now living in since the
collapse of his marriage. Like an Essex boy Travis Bickle, Jim offloads
a heap of neuroses as he prepares for war. Preferring to touch
furniture to people, Jim has written to the Prime Minister a hundred
times, and now dreams of the hitherto unexplored erotic possibilities
of his smile.
Performed by Osborn himself with scarifying intensity in Maggie
Hinchley's production, Shopping Centre's tautly realised and
fantastically performed script captures the troublingly recognisable
downward spiral of a disenfranchised working-class male in crisis and
about to explode. Reactionary, unreconstructed and sexually repressed,
there are probably a million Jims out there fighting for survival.
Osborn's study of this man on the street, however, is anything but
ordinary.
The Herald, Aug 2, 2012
ends
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