Monkey Bars – Traverse – 4 stars With the pan-generational mix of teenage angst and impending death onstage at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Chris Goode's new verbatim piece taken from conversations initiated by Karl James looks to an even younger generation for guidance. Goode's own co-production with the Unicorn Theatre then has adult actors suited and booted in grown-up office and dinner-party wear. The juxtaposition between half-formed voices possibly learned from parents by rote and a presentation and delivery that givers the performers the air of politicians or bureaucrats is a fascinating one. Talk of favourite sweets and playtime is subsequently given the weight by Goode's six performers of life-changing events that they actually do when you're eight years old. This avoids any Kids Say the Funniest Things style cutesiness, and is more akin to the very first series of Michael Apted's seminal and ongoing TV documentary, Seven Up. That crucial social document interviewed a group of seven year olds in 1964, and has filmed them every seven years since. While Goode and James' play is unlikely to have that luxury, it is nevertheless a telling insight into a generation who have been given voice for the first time. More importantly, perhaps, they've been listened to in a way that allows their un-studied wisdom to flourish. Until August 26 Just A Gigolo – Assembly George Square – 3 stars The first rule of life, according to Angelo Ravagli in Stephen Lowe's solo vehicle for actor Maurice Roeves, is to never disappoint a woman. As the model for 'energetic' game-keeper Mellors in DH Lawrence's taboo-busting novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Ravagli was clearly talking from experience. Ravagli, after all, moved from being the couple's gardener to hitch up as Frieda Lawrence's third and final husband after the novelist's death. As Lowe and Roeves' portrait of a penniless but still raffish widower Ravagli attempts to flog off nine of Lawrence's paintings to his hotel-owing chum, Saki Karavas, he gradually unveils his colourful past as only someone written into literary legend can dine out on. With the images projected behind Roeves as he sits at a cafe table relating his yarn as if rehearsing for a late night chat show, pearls of wisdom such as that above are reeled off like well-polished diamonds. It's a fascinating if at time somewhat dense elongated anecdote, brought to life by Roeves with a dashingly charismatic sense of mischief that's worthy of an old-time matinee idol. It's fitting too that Lowe's play is being performed in what is usually one of Edinburgh University's modern lecture theatres. Before the bull-dozers moved in, Traverse co-founder Jim Haynes' original Paperback Bookshop was housed a mere stone's throw away. One of the few places that sold Lawrence's works, it was outside the premises where two disgusted ladies from the Salvation Army were captured on film setting a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover alight, reducing it to the ashes of immorality. What, one wonders, would they think if they knew that a reincarnated Ravagli had been in the neighbourhood? Until August 27th. Strong Arm – Underbelly – 3 stars Explorations of machismo have been all the rage in the Underbelly’s Old Vic New Voices strand of new work. Finlay Robertson's new solo play, which he performs himself in Kate Budgens' production takes such notions to muscle-bound extremes in the cautionary tale of Roland Poland, the picked-on fat kid who starts pumping iron, but who gets so obsessed with his own image of being a hunk that he falls for his own reflection. If Robertson himself doesn't physically cut it as Roland, his examination of the shy little boy that hides behind the chemically enhanced but increasingly tetchy Adonis the world sees is a telling one. Men, it seems, are under just as much pressure body-image-wise, as women. While Robertson has contrived to make an energetic study of the male psyche, for all his verve as a performer, the text needs more crafting to give it the weight, no pun intended – required. At the moment, Strong Arm has plenty of beef, but not enough muscle to pack the punch required. Until August 26th. The Herald, August 21st 2012 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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