Royal Lyceum Theatre 4 stars On a movie screen, a terrified young woman is pleading for her life in what could be a scene from a lo-fi horror flick. The next time we see the woman we find out is called Alice, she’s in front of a camera again, just as scared as she auditions for a hard-core porn film. Is Alice for real here, or is she faking it, to death if necessary? These are some of the questions being asked by director Matthew Lenton in Vanishing Point’s look at the dark side of pornography, co-produced with two Italian companies and Trmway, Glasgow. Here, as Alice’s tale is paralleled by an internet porn addict’s own descent, performers, directors and consumers become complicit in some psycho-sexual rabbit hole where love, erotica and even cheap thrills are forsaken in favour of what looks like extreme forms of mutual abuse. The third in Vanishing Point’s loose-knit trilogy of impressionistic works seen largely behind glass, where Interiors and Saturday Night looked at the public and private tics of human behaviour, Wonderland is the dirty little secret lurking behind both. While there is much more heard dialogue here than in the other two pieces, the images played out on Kai Fischer’s set and pulsed along by Mark Melville’s brooding score are snapshots from the grimmest of fantasias. As Alice, Jenny Hulse is unflinching as she leads a Scots-Italian cast of seven through some of the play’s starker, more naturalistic moments. The “normal, healthy individual” played by Paul Thomas Hickey’ is even more troubling. It’s the matter-of-factness that scares the most in a brave and deeply serious theatrical meditation on the uglier aspects of the sex industry today. The Herald, August 30th 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
Comments