Tramway,
Glasgow
Four
stars
Imagine
waking up one morning and the world you thought you knew appears to have been
taken over by what you previously regarded as something other. That’s kind of
the starting point for this audacious collaboration between director Stewart
Laing and writer Pamela Carter, which draws on ideas and iconography from the
1950s piece of Cold War sci-fi paranoia about giant insects that gives the show
its title. It duly explodes all this into a piece of total theatre that
explores the ever changing ways of being we’re living through today, with one
eye on tomorrow, and, with any luck, a bright new future ahead.
Carter
and Laing frame this in the form of a prime time TV chat show, hosted by
irrepressible actress Kiruna Stamell. The house band led by Carla J Easton is
in place, and special guest for the evening is, for a while at least, the real
Stewart Laing, who’s here to talk about his Glasgow-set musical remake of Them!
This
is as straight as things get in Laing’s National Theatre of Scotland
production, as identities are swapped, reinvention is all the rage and ridicule
is nothing to be scared of. As guests go off-script on Nick Millar’s TV studio
set, it feels like anything might happen, and probably will. And that’s just
the first part, as all notions of what theatre is, was and could be are
confounded and subverted by the sheer array of ideas laid bare by more than
twenty performers on stage, all dressed in uniform black tracksuits.
The
second and third acts feature a whole lot more bodies, with the third part in
particular showing off a cast of thousands at work, rest and play as the
collective body politic transcends wanton individualism in surprising and
radically different ways. The end result is a bold, playful and ever-expanding
theatrical mash-up that provokes, meditates, sings, shouts and dances its way
through a mixed-up, muddled up, shook-up world with glorious abandon.
The Herald, July 1st 2019
ends
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