Skip to main content

The Deep


Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen
Four stars

With the fishing industry very much in the news just now, the young Aberdeen-based 10ft Tall theatre company couldn’t have timed their revival of Graeme Maley’s vivid Scots adaptation of Icelandic writer Jon Atli Jonasson’s bleakly poetic one-man play better. This is no polemic, however, but a haunting internal monologue that lays bare the brutal fragility of everyday life when thrown to the mercy of the elements.

Cameron Mowat’s beautifully poised production starts off looking like a folk pub story-telling session, with actor Andy Clark and fellow performer Kevin Lennon, here in his sound designer guise, wielding banjo and guitar as the audience enter. It’s a deceptively comforting opening, with Clark’s young fisher-man sucker-punching us even more as he begins what appears to be a campfire shaggy dog yarn about his working day.

From his opening yawn, the fisher-man’s descriptions of his vividly hum-drum world are comically ribald thumb-nail sketches translated into routines worthy of Under Milk Wood. His old Ma’, the girl he fancies and the tough, weather-beaten bruisers he works besides below deck are all in the mix. The re-enactment of the final scene of Titanic is a work of art in itself. Once the tide turns, however, the young man’s life hangs perilously in the balance.

Mowat, Clark, Lennon and the rest of the 10ft Tall team have breathed enough fresh life into Jonasson’s text, first seen in Maley’s version at Oran Mor in Glasgow a few years back, for it to be able to claim modern classic status. The localised demotic is vital here to make it even richer in a production which, seen in a venue that is clearly Aberdeen’s greatest artistic secret (hands off, property developers), shows off the full potential of investing in grassroots artistic activity in the north-east.

The Herald, March 22 2018

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...

Andrew Midgley obituary

Born October 26th 1965 Died October 28th 2010 Andrew Midgley, who has died of a heart attack during a session in a Musselburgh gym aged forty-five, didn’t look like a pop star. Neither did this most garrulously playful of raconteurs particularly enjoy talking about his brief time in the charts during the early 1990s. Yet, while there was far more to this most singular of autodidacts, as one half of club-dance duo Cola Boy, Midgley caught the pop-rave zeitgeist with appearances on Top of the Pops performing the band’s infectiously catchy top ten hit, Seven Ways To Love. Even here, however, just as he would later apply diligence and care behind the scenes as a sub-editor on the Edinburgh Evening News, creating two of the funniest websites on the planet or managing an award-winning comedian, the man nicknamed ‘Boy Naughty’ preferred to stay in the background, allowing former Wham! backing singer turned Radio Two DJ Janey Lee Grace to bask in the day-glo spotlight of the period. Mid...