Skip to main content

Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Three stars

The question mark is everything in the title of Caryl Churchill's 2006 play, in which two gay lovers take on the world they might just be running. Not that anything is made too explicit here in a punishing forty-five minute ride around the psycho-sexual impetus behind the desperate need for power enough to shore up a void of self-loathing and a terror of anything resembling affection.

As Kevin Lennon's Sam and Sandy Grierson's Guy swagger around the Citizens' Circle Studio while the audience enter to a minimal techno soundtrack and bathed beneath swirling spotlights, this is certainly the case with Sam's more aggressive half of the partnership. Necking beer too fast and with a punchbag hanging within reach, he is the boss, and is clearly in charge of the punishment that is doled out to help keep him there, be it in Vietnam or any other war that blew up in his face. Guy is more passive, a too eager to please civil servant who knows how to make things happen, but whose devoted lust for his other half has left him needy and pathetic.

Nora Wardell's explosive little production takes an already symbol-laden text concerning the private habits of queen and country and loads it with even more up-to-date imagery. If previously its Two Tribes style combatants were George and Tony, here think Donand and, well, you choose. “It's exhausting being so thrilled,” says Guy at one point, high on his own world-changing experience in a relentless battle royal that leaves both men emasculated, impotent and the ultimate losers of an endless war of words. Sad.


The Herald, March 31st 2017

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Suzy Glass – Message from the Skies

Freedom of movement matters to Suzy Glass, the arts and events producer currently overseeing the second edition of Message from the Skies.This animated literary derive around the city forms part of this year’s Edinburgh’s Hogmanay programme, and runs right through till Burns’ Night. Glass’ concerns are inherent in the event itself, which has commissioned six writers from different disciplines and experiences to each pen a love letter to Europe. Each writer has then paired up with a composer and visual artist or film-maker, with the results of each collaboration projected in monumental fashion on the walls of one of half a dozen of the capital’s most iconic buildings.
With venues stretching from the south side of Edinburgh to Leith, and with one city centre stop requiring a walk up Calton Hill, there is considerable legwork required to complete the circuit. It shouldn’t be considered a race, however, and audiences are free to move between venues at their leisure, visiting each site on d…
Post a Comment
Read more

Kieran Hurley – Mouthpiece

Things have changed since Kieran Hurley first began writing the play that would become Mouthpiece, which opens at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this weekend. At the time, Hurley was, in his own words, “quite new on the scene.” As a writer and performer, he had already scored hits with Beats and Chalk Farm, two pieces that put him on the map with a new generation of theatre-makers steeped in an equally new wave of grassroots opposition that drew from the iconography of revolutions past. Where Beats looked at the politicisation of 1990s club culture, Chalk Farm, co-written with AJ Taudevin, focused on a teenage boy caught up in the 2011 London riots.
More plays followed. Some, like Heads Up used the same solo story-telling aesthetic to look at an everyday apocalypse. More recently, Square Go, written with Gary McNair, dissected toxic masculinity through a school playground fight.
All the while as Hurley developed as a writer, from new kid on the block to established provocateur, this…
Post a Comment
Read more

Rob Drummond – The Mack

Rob Drummond was at home in England when he looked at the news feed on his phone, and saw a post about the fire at Glasgow School of Art. It was June 2018, and the writer and performer behind such hits as Grain in the Blood, Bullet Catch and Our Fathers initially presumed the post was to mark the fourth anniversary of the 2014 blaze in GSA’s Mackintosh Building, which was undergoing a major restoration after much of it was destroyed.
As it turned out, the news was far worse, as reports of a second fire were beamed across the world. As someone who had taken Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s iconic construction for granted while living in Glasgow, Drummond was as stunned as anyone else with even a passing relationship with the Mack.
While emotions continue to run high in response to the disaster, Drummond channelled his thoughts on all this into what he does best. The result is The Mack, a new play that forms part of Oran Mor’s A Play, A Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre season in Glasgow prior …
Post a Comment
Read more