His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen 4 stars Robin Jenkins’ World War Two set novel is a broodingly strange affair. Peter Arnott’s new adaptation takes all of Jenkins’ concerns about class, good, evil and the self-destructive fear of otherness on the one hand and an empathetic desire to transcend one’s own station on the other, and makes a big serious statement on the human condition that retains its human heart. Set on a remote Highland estate, the leafy splendour occupied by what are here referred to simply as Lady and Captain, as well as Lady’s liberal-minded twelve year old Roddie, is ripped asunder by the rude intrusion of two brothers, the dour Neil and his brother Callum, the latter of whom would be classed today as having learning disabilities. Watching over all this is game-keeper Duror, who, with a terminally ill wife in her sick-bed, resembles a contemporary vigilante on the verge and is already on the shortest of fuses. In Callum, Duror recognises imperfections he can’t bear, with tragic consequences as he goes into psychological meltdown. With enough space left for the play to breathe through a set of fine turns led by John Kielty and Ben Winger as the brothers, Ireland brings all this to rich poetic life on Hayden Griffin’s mighty-looking set awash with back projections that lend a panoramic scope from the play’s opening image. Duror’s wife Peggy, played by Helen Logan, moves as if operated by puppeteers. The deer being hunted down becomes a Bambi-esque solo dance by Maxine Hamilton. It’s Duror’s speech betraying his own potential fanaticism, however, juxtaposed here with Pathe news footage of Hitler’s holocaust, which chills the most. The Herald, September 17th 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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