Inveresk Lodge Gardens, Musselburgh 4 stars The joy of gardening, by all accounts, comes with the sense of purposeful distraction it brings alongside the appeal of growing things in a way that remains both practical and creative. Much the same can be said for Dora and Maddy, the two sisters in Jules Horne’s deliciously brutal play, performed outdoors in Nutshell’s touring revival of the company’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe hit. As the audience are welcomed into one of East Lothian’s most charming nooks with tea and scones, there’s an initial village fete feel to Kate Nelson’s production. This is accentuated by actors Nicola Jo Cully and Gowan Calder’s chatty pre-show introduction that segues into the show itself. At first the siblings are, in Maddy’s words, “young and immortal,” burying their teddy-bears and launching dismembered Sindy dolls from aloft the shed roof as the garden becomes den, playground and safe haven from the grown-up world. The falls which go on to define each sister at opposite ends of the play, however, become Eden-like metaphors as much as life-threateningly physical. Horne’s richly-textured and really rather lovely script is full of little symbolic touches like this that are brought to life in a vivid piece of dramatised story-telling shot through with a dark, whip-smart wit that digs beyond the play’s emotional top-soil. As Maddy and Dora blossom into increasingly troubled womanhood, Cully and Calder occupy their characters with a sense of wide-eyed grotesquerie that still manages to retain a sense of broken humanity. The effect is of a green-fingered Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?, but with warmth tempering the day to day venom beneath in a loving study of sibling rivalry in extremis. The Herald, September 10th 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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