Tron Theatre, Glasgow 3 stars If Adam and Eve had scromphed down home-grown avocadoes instead of apples, things might have turned out a whole lot rosier in the garden. Or at least that’s the impression you get from the domestic Eden built by the biblically named Ade, Kane and Evelyn in Sylvia Dow’s new play, lovingly directed by Selma Dimitrijevic for the London-based Greyscale company in association with Stellar Quines. A couple, giddy on the possibilities of each other, fall together, set up home and play happy families, knee-deep in a forest of plants and acquired memories that gradually fill up their room. The latter is depicted via an extended wordless sequence that would put some furniture removal firms to shame, as the pair embark on a great adventure of magic moments and endless games of Scrabble. Things only darken with a seemingly estranged prodigal’s return and a death in the family that comes gift-wrapped. All this is implied rather than told in a very particular aesthetic employed by Dow and Dimitrijevic on Oliver Townsend’s pin-board set, from the way the actors loll about eyeing up the audience as they enter while one of them strums a guitar, to the final, multi-lingual, life-affirming chorus. It’s an aesthetic that falls just the right side of quirky in what is essentially an extended meditation on life, death and the love that clutters up the place in-between the two. If Dow’s ideas are big, there’s an essential warmth to the performances of Jon Foster, Andrew Gourley and Emilie Patry. This is accentuated by Scott Twynholm’s lovely score in a play that recognises that, whatever happens, life goes on regardless. The Herald, September 7th 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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