The final compendium of short new plays with a conscience done in a
lo-fi script-in-hand manner in the Traverse bar cafe first thing in the
morning was a part greatest hits, part world exclusive show that fully
justified the initiative's Bank of Scotland Herald Angel win at the
weekend. Two plays, Anders Lustgarten's The Break Out and Clara
Brennan's heartfelt and life-affirming monologue, Spine, had been
deemed good enough to merit speedy revivals.
Lustgarten's piece about two female jailbirds who find they're able to
break out with ease after prison budget cuts mean less bricks in the
walls even had the added bonus of two different actresses playing the
cell-mates to add a different energy to proceedings. It is Spine,
however, that should be downloaded and distributed (free of charge, as
with all Theatre Uncut contributions) post-haste. Rosie Wyatt's
rendering of Brennan's beautiful play about a pan-generational alliance
in care of a horde of stolen library books has twice now proved to be
one of the finest and most touching moments of this year's Fringe.
Of the new works, The Birth of My Violence, translated from its
original Spanish by Roberto Cavazos, is a monologue in which one man
wrestles with the contradictions between art, action and artistic
action, while Blondie, by twenty-two year old Hayley Squires, finds a
drop-dead gorgeous demagogue interrogated by police before going to the
gallows in a dystopian Britain on the verge of collapse.
After a brief if slightly chaotic ad hoc nod to the incarceration of
female Russian punk band, Pussy Riot, the main event of the morning
came in The Naked Rambler, a new piece by David Greig so fresh that the
entire event was delayed slightly so the cast of Tam Dean Burn and
Ashley Smith could read the script through to the end – for the first
time. Burn and Smith play two bored Fife PCs whose time watching the
Olympics on TV is interrupted by the arrival of Stephen Gough, aka the
real-life Naked Rambler, who was recently re-arrested in Fife after
spending six years in Perth and Saughton prisons for consistently
appearing nude in public.
While highlighting the absurdities of Gough's sentencing, Greig moves
into the realms of magical-realist farce, as the landscape visibly
changes around them. While one blames Olympic opening ceremony director
Danny Boyle for the spectacle, the other gets back to nature and joins
the increasingly naked throng.
Things may be rough round the edges, but all of the plays are
thrillingly of the moment. Presuming that the cuts will go on getting
deeper, Theatre uncut will return in November with a set of even newer
works. Run ended.
The Herald, August 23rd 2012
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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